Search Results

Search found 14464 results on 579 pages for 'del icio us'.

Page 550/579 | < Previous Page | 546 547 548 549 550 551 552 553 554 555 556 557  | Next Page >

• Video on Architecture and Code Quality using Visual Studio 2012&ndash;interview with Marcel de Vries and Terje Sandstrom by Adam Cogan

  - by terje

  Find the video HERE. Adam Cogan did a great Web TV interview with Marcel de Vries and myself on the topics of architecture and code quality.  It was real fun participating in this session.  Although we know each other from the MVP ALM community,  Marcel, Adam and I haven’t worked together before. It was very interesting to see how we agreed on so many terms, and how alike we where thinking.  The basics of ensuring you have a good architecture and how you could document it is one thing.  Also, the same agreement on the importance of having a high quality code base, and how we used the Visual Studio 2012 tools, and some others (NDepend for example)  to measure and ensure that the code quality was where it should be.  As the tools, methods and thinking popped up during the interview it was a lot of “Hey !  I do that too!”.  The tools are not only for “after the fact” work, but we use them during the coding.  That way the tools becomes an integrated part of our coding work, and helps us to find issues we may have overlooked.  The video has a bunch of call outs, pinpointing important things to remember. These are also listed on the corresponding web page. I haven’t seen that touch before, but really liked this way of doing it – it makes it much easier to spot the highlights.  Titus Maclaren and Raj Dhatt from SSW have done a terrific job producing this video.  And thanks to Lei Xu for doing the camera and recording job.  Thanks guys ! Also, if you are at TechEd Amsterdam 2012, go and listen to Adam Cogan in his session on “A modern architecture review: Using the new code review tools” Friday 29th, 10.15-11.30 and Marcel de Vries session on “Intellitrace, what is it and how can I use it to my benefit” Wednesday 27th, 5-6.15 The highlights points out some important practices.  I’ll elaborate on a few of them here: Add instructions on how to compile the solution.  You do this by adding a text file with instructions to the solution, and keep it under source control.  These instructions should contain what is needed on top of a standard install of Visual Studio.  I do a lot of code reviews, and more often that not, I am not even able to compile the program, because they have used some tool or library that needs to be installed.  The same applies to any new developer who enters into the team, so do this to increase your productivity when the team changes, or a team member switches computer. Don’t forget to document what you have to configure on the computer, the IIS being a common one. The more automatic you can do this, the better.  Use NuGet to get down libraries. When the text document gets more than say, half a page, with a bunch of different things to do, convert it into a powershell script instead.  The metrics warning levels.  These are very conservatively set by Microsoft.  You rarely see anything but green, and besides, you should have color scales for each of the metrics.  I have a blog post describing a more appropriate set of levels, based on both research work and industry “best practices”.  The essential limits are: Cyclomatic complexity and coupling:  Higher numbers are worse On method levels: Green :  From 0 to 10 Yellow:  From 10 to 20  (some say 15).   Acceptable, but have a look to see if there is something unneeded here. Red: From 20 to 40:   Action required, get these down. Bleeding Red: Above 40   This is the real red alert.  Immediate action!  (My invention, as people have asked what do I do when I have cyclomatic complexity of 150.  The only answer I could think of was: RUN! ) Maintainability index:  Lower numbers are worse, scale from 0 to 100. On method levels: Green:  60 to 100 Yellow:  40 – 60.    You will always have methods here too, accept the higher ones, take a look at those who are down to the lower limit.  Check up against the other metrics.) Red:  20 – 40:  Action required, fix these. Bleeding red:  Below 20.  Immediate action required. When doing metrics analysis, you should leave the generated code out.  You do this by adding attributes, unfortunately Microsoft has “forgotten” to add these to all their stuff, so you might have to add them to some of the code.  It most cases it can be done so that it is not overwritten by a new round of code generation.  Take a look a my blog post here for details on how to do that. Class level metrics might also be useful, at least for coupling and maintenance.  But it is much more difficult to set any fixed limits on those.  Any metric aggregations on higher level tend to be pretty useless, as the number of methods vary pretty much, and there are little science on what number of methods can be regarded as good or bad.  NDepend have a recommendation, but they say it may vary too.  And in these days of data binding, the number might be pretty high, as properties counts as methods.  However, if you take the worst case situations, classes with more than 20 methods are suspicious, and coupling and cyclomatic complexity go red above 20, so any classes with more than 20x20 = 400 for these measures should be checked over. In the video we mention the SOLID principles, coined by “Uncle Bob” (Richard Martin). One of them, the Dependency Inversion principle we discuss in the video.  It is important to note that this principle is NOT on whether you should use a Dependency Inversion Container or not, it is about how you design the interfaces and interactions between your classes.  The Dependency Inversion Container is just one technique which is based on this principle, but which main purpose is to isolate things you would like to change at runtime, for example if you implement a plug in architecture.  Overuse of a Dependency Inversion Container is however, NOT a good thing.  It should be used for a purpose and not as a general DI solution.  The general DI solution and thinking however is useful far beyond the DIC.   You should always “program to an abstraction”, and not to the concreteness.  We also talk a bit about the GRASP patterns, a term coined by Craig Larman in his book Applying UML and design patterns. GRASP patterns stand for General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns and describe fundamental principles of object design and responsibility assignment.  What I find great with these patterns is that they is another way to focus on the responsibility of a class.  One of the things I most often found that is broken in software designs, is that the class lack responsibility, and as a result there are a lot of classes mucking around in the internals of the other classes.  We also discuss the term “Code Smells”.  This term was invented by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler when they worked with Fowler’s “Refactoring” book. A code smell is a set of “bad” coding practices, which are the drivers behind a corresponding set of refactorings.  Here is a good list of the smells, and their corresponding refactor patterns. See also this.

  Read the article

• Hello Operator, My Switch Is Bored

  - by Paul White

  This is a post for T-SQL Tuesday #43 hosted by my good friend Rob Farley. The topic this month is Plan Operators. I haven’t taken part in T-SQL Tuesday before, but I do like to write about execution plans, so this seemed like a good time to start. This post is in two parts. The first part is primarily an excuse to use a pretty bad play on words in the title of this blog post (if you’re too young to know what a telephone operator or a switchboard is, I hate you). The second part of the post looks at an invisible query plan operator (so to speak). 1. My Switch Is Bored Allow me to present the rare and interesting execution plan operator, Switch: Books Online has this to say about Switch: Following that description, I had a go at producing a Fast Forward Cursor plan that used the TOP operator, but had no luck. That may be due to my lack of skill with cursors, I’m not too sure. The only application of Switch in SQL Server 2012 that I am familiar with requires a local partitioned view: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 00 AND 24)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 25 AND 49)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T3 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 50 AND 74)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T4 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 75 AND 99)); GO CREATE VIEW V1 AS SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T1 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T2 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T3 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T4; Not only that, but it needs an updatable local partitioned view. We’ll need some primary keys to meet that requirement: ALTER TABLE dbo.T1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T2 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T3 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T3 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T4 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T4 PRIMARY KEY (c1); We also need an INSERT statement that references the view. Even more specifically, to see a Switch operator, we need to perform a single-row insert (multi-row inserts use a different plan shape): INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1); And now…the execution plan: The Constant Scan manufactures a single row with no columns. The Compute Scalar works out which partition of the view the new value should go in. The Assert checks that the computed partition number is not null (if it is, an error is returned). The Nested Loops Join executes exactly once, with the partition id as an outer reference (correlated parameter). The Switch operator checks the value of the parameter and executes the corresponding input only. If the partition id is 0, the uppermost Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T1. If the partition id is 1, the next lower Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T2…and so on. In case you were wondering, here’s a query and execution plan for a multi-row insert to the view: INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1), (2); Yuck! An Eager Table Spool and four Filters! I prefer the Switch plan. My guess is that almost all the old strategies that used a Switch operator have been replaced over time, using things like a regular Concatenation Union All combined with Start-Up Filters on its inputs. Other new (relative to the Switch operator) features like table partitioning have specific execution plan support that doesn’t need the Switch operator either. This feels like a bit of a shame, but perhaps it is just nostalgia on my part, it’s hard to know. Please do let me know if you encounter a query that can still use the Switch operator in 2012 – it must be very bored if this is the only possible modern usage! 2. Invisible Plan Operators The second part of this post uses an example based on a question Dave Ballantyne asked using the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer plan upload facility. If you haven’t tried that yet, make sure you’re on the latest version of the (free) Plan Explorer software, and then click the Post to SQLPerformance.com button. That will create a site question with the query plan attached (which can be anonymized if the plan contains sensitive information). Aaron Bertrand and I keep a close eye on questions there, so if you have ever wanted to ask a query plan question of either of us, that’s a good way to do it. The problem The issue I want to talk about revolves around a query issued against a calendar table. The script below creates a simplified version and adds 100 years of per-day information to it: USE tempdb; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Calendar ( dt date NOT NULL, isWeekday bit NOT NULL, theYear smallint NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT PK__dbo_Calendar_dt PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (dt) ); GO -- Monday is the first day of the week for me SET DATEFIRST 1;   -- Add 100 years of data INSERT dbo.Calendar WITH (TABLOCKX) (dt, isWeekday, theYear) SELECT CA.dt, isWeekday = CASE WHEN DATEPART(WEEKDAY, CA.dt) IN (6, 7) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END, theYear = YEAR(CA.dt) FROM Sandpit.dbo.Numbers AS N CROSS APPLY ( VALUES (DATEADD(DAY, N.n - 1, CONVERT(date, '01 Jan 2000', 113))) ) AS CA (dt) WHERE N.n BETWEEN 1 AND 36525; The following query counts the number of weekend days in 2013: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; It returns the correct result (104) using the following execution plan: The query optimizer has managed to estimate the number of rows returned from the table exactly, based purely on the default statistics created separately on the two columns referenced in the query’s WHERE clause. (Well, almost exactly, the unrounded estimate is 104.289 rows.) There is already an invisible operator in this query plan – a Filter operator used to apply the WHERE clause predicates. We can see it by re-running the query with the enormously useful (but undocumented) trace flag 9130 enabled: Now we can see the full picture. The whole table is scanned, returning all 36,525 rows, before the Filter narrows that down to just the 104 we want. Without the trace flag, the Filter is incorporated in the Clustered Index Scan as a residual predicate. It is a little bit more efficient than using a separate operator, but residual predicates are still something you will want to avoid where possible. The estimates are still spot on though: Anyway, looking to improve the performance of this query, Dave added the following filtered index to the Calendar table: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear) WHERE isWeekday = 0; The original query now produces a much more efficient plan: Unfortunately, the estimated number of rows produced by the seek is now wrong (365 instead of 104): What’s going on? The estimate was spot on before we added the index! Explanation You might want to grab a coffee for this bit. Using another trace flag or two (8606 and 8612) we can see that the cardinality estimates were exactly right initially: The highlighted information shows the initial cardinality estimates for the base table (36,525 rows), the result of applying the two relational selects in our WHERE clause (104 rows), and after performing the COUNT_BIG(*) group by aggregate (1 row). All of these are correct, but that was before cost-based optimization got involved :) Cost-based optimization When cost-based optimization starts up, the logical tree above is copied into a structure (the ‘memo’) that has one group per logical operation (roughly speaking). The logical read of the base table (LogOp_Get) ends up in group 7; the two predicates (LogOp_Select) end up in group 8 (with the details of the selections in subgroups 0-6). These two groups still have the correct cardinalities as trace flag 8608 output (initial memo contents) shows: During cost-based optimization, a rule called SelToIdxStrategy runs on group 8. It’s job is to match logical selections to indexable expressions (SARGs). It successfully matches the selections (theYear = 2013, is Weekday = 0) to the filtered index, and writes a new alternative into the memo structure. The new alternative is entered into group 8 as option 1 (option 0 was the original LogOp_Select): The new alternative is to do nothing (PhyOp_NOP = no operation), but to instead follow the new logical instructions listed below the NOP. The LogOp_GetIdx (full read of an index) goes into group 21, and the LogOp_SelectIdx (selection on an index) is placed in group 22, operating on the result of group 21. The definition of the comparison ‘the Year = 2013’ (ScaOp_Comp downwards) was already present in the memo starting at group 2, so no new memo groups are created for that. New Cardinality Estimates The new memo groups require two new cardinality estimates to be derived. First, LogOp_Idx (full read of the index) gets a predicted cardinality of 10,436. This number comes from the filtered index statistics: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH STAT_HEADER; The second new cardinality derivation is for the LogOp_SelectIdx applying the predicate (theYear = 2013). To get a number for this, the cardinality estimator uses statistics for the column ‘theYear’, producing an estimate of 365 rows (there are 365 days in 2013!): DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, theYear) WITH HISTOGRAM; This is where the mistake happens. Cardinality estimation should have used the filtered index statistics here, to get an estimate of 104 rows: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH HISTOGRAM; Unfortunately, the logic has lost sight of the link between the read of the filtered index (LogOp_GetIdx) in group 22, and the selection on that index (LogOp_SelectIdx) that it is deriving a cardinality estimate for, in group 21. The correct cardinality estimate (104 rows) is still present in the memo, attached to group 8, but that group now has a PhyOp_NOP implementation. Skipping over the rest of cost-based optimization (in a belated attempt at brevity) we can see the optimizer’s final output using trace flag 8607: This output shows the (incorrect, but understandable) 365 row estimate for the index range operation, and the correct 104 estimate still attached to its PhyOp_NOP. This tree still has to go through a few post-optimizer rewrites and ‘copy out’ from the memo structure into a tree suitable for the execution engine. One step in this process removes PhyOp_NOP, discarding its 104-row cardinality estimate as it does so. To finish this section on a more positive note, consider what happens if we add an OVER clause to the query aggregate. This isn’t intended to be a ‘fix’ of any sort, I just want to show you that the 104 estimate can survive and be used if later cardinality estimation needs it: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) OVER () FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; The estimated execution plan is: Note the 365 estimate at the Index Seek, but the 104 lives again at the Segment! We can imagine the lost predicate ‘isWeekday = 0’ as sitting between the seek and the segment in an invisible Filter operator that drops the estimate from 365 to 104. Even though the NOP group is removed after optimization (so we don’t see it in the execution plan) bear in mind that all cost-based choices were made with the 104-row memo group present, so although things look a bit odd, it shouldn’t affect the optimizer’s plan selection. I should also mention that we can work around the estimation issue by including the index’s filtering columns in the index key: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear, isWeekday) WHERE isWeekday = 0 WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON); There are some downsides to doing this, including that changes to the isWeekday column may now require Halloween Protection, but that is unlikely to be a big problem for a static calendar table ;)  With the updated index in place, the original query produces an execution plan with the correct cardinality estimation showing at the Index Seek: That’s all for today, remember to let me know about any Switch plans you come across on a modern instance of SQL Server! Finally, here are some other posts of mine that cover other plan operators: Segment and Sequence Project Common Subexpression Spools Why Plan Operators Run Backwards Row Goals and the Top Operator Hash Match Flow Distinct Top N Sort Index Spools and Page Splits Singleton and Range Seeks Bitmaps Hash Join Performance Compute Scalar © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

  Read the article

• Looking into Entity Framework Code First Migrations

  - by nikolaosk

  In this post I will introduce you to Code First Migrations, an Entity Framework feature introduced in version 4.3 back in February of 2012.I have extensively covered Entity Framework in this blog. Please find my other Entity Framework posts here .   Before the addition of Code First Migrations (4.1,4.2 versions), Code First database initialisation meant that Code First would create the database if it does not exist (the default behaviour - CreateDatabaseIfNotExists). The other pattern we could use is DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges which means that Entity Framework, will drop the database if it realises that model has changes since the last time it created the database.The final pattern is DropCreateDatabaseAlways which means that Code First will recreate the database every time one runs the application.That is of course fine for the development database but totally unacceptable and catastrophic when you have a production database. We cannot lose our data because of the work that Code First works.Migrations solve this problem.With migrations we can modify the database without completely dropping it.We can modify the database schema to reflect the changes to the model without losing data.In version EF 5.0 migrations are fully included and supported. I will demonstrate migrations with a hands-on example.Let me say a few words first about Entity Framework first. The .Net framework provides support for Object Relational Mappingthrough EF. So EF is a an ORM tool and it is now the main data access technology that microsoft works on. I use it quite extensively in my projects. Through EF we have many things out of the box provided for us. We have the automatic generation of SQL code.It maps relational data to strongly types objects.All the changes made to the objects in the memory are persisted in a transactional way back to the data store. You can find in this post an example on how to use the Entity Framework to retrieve data from an SQL Server Database using the "Database/Schema First" approach.In this approach we make all the changes at the database level and then we update the model with those changes. In this post you can see an example on how to use the "Model First" approach when working with ASP.Net and the Entity Framework.This model was firstly introduced in EF version 4.0 and we could start with a blank model and then create a database from that model.When we made changes to the model , we could recreate the database from the new model. The Code First approach is the more code-centric than the other two. Basically we write POCO classes and then we persist to a database using something called DBContext.Code First relies on DbContext. We create 2,3 classes (e.g Person,Product) with properties and then these classes interact with the DbContext class we can create a new database based upon our POCOS classes and have tables generated from those classes.We do not have an .edmx file in this approach.By using this approach we can write much easier unit tests.DbContext is a new context class and is smaller,lightweight wrapper for the main context class which is ObjectContext (Schema First and Model First).Let's move on to our hands-on example.I have installed VS 2012 Ultimate edition in my Windows 8 machine. 1)  Create an empty asp.net web application. Give your application a suitable name. Choose C# as the development language2) Add a new web form item in your application. Leave the default name.3) Create a new folder. Name it CodeFirst .4) Add a new item in your application, a class file. Name it Footballer.cs. This is going to be a simple POCO class.Place this class file in the CodeFirst folder.The code follows    public class Footballer     {         public int FootballerID { get; set; }         public string FirstName { get; set; }         public string LastName { get; set; }         public double Weight { get; set; }         public double Height { get; set; }              }5) We will have to add EF 5.0 to our project. Right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select Manage NuGet Packages... for it.In the window that will pop up search for Entity Framework and install it.Have a look at the picture below   If you want to find out if indeed EF version is 5.0 version is installed have a look at the References. Have a look at the picture below to see what you will see if you have installed everything correctly.Have a look at the picture below 6) Then we need to create a context class that inherits from DbContext.Add a new class to the CodeFirst folder.Name it FootballerDBContext.Now that we have the entity classes created, we must let the model know.I will have to use the DbSet<T> property.The code for this class follows     public class FootballerDBContext:DbContext     {         public DbSet<Footballer> Footballers { get; set; }             }    Do not forget to add  (using System.Data.Entity;) in the beginning of the class file 7) We must take care of the connection string. It is very easy to create one in the web.config.It does not matter that we do not have a database yet.When we run the DbContext and query against it , it will use a connection string in the web.config and will create the database based on the classes.I will use the name "FootballTraining" for the database.In my case the connection string inside the web.config, looks like this    <connectionStrings>    <add name="CodeFirstDBContext" connectionString="server=.;integrated security=true; database=FootballTraining" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>                       </connectionStrings>8) Now it is time to create Linq to Entities queries to retrieve data from the database . Add a new class to your application in the CodeFirst folder.Name the file DALfootballer.csWe will create a simple public method to retrieve the footballers. The code for the class followspublic class DALfootballer     {         FootballerDBContext ctx = new FootballerDBContext();         public List<Footballer> GetFootballers()         {             var query = from player in ctx.Footballers select player;             return query.ToList();         }     } 9) Place a GridView control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name.Add an ObjectDataSource control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name. Set the DatasourceID property of the GridView control to the ID of the ObjectDataSource control.(DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1" ). Let's configure the ObjectDataSource control. Click on the smart tag item of the ObjectDataSource control and select Configure Data Source. In the Wizzard that pops up select the DALFootballer class and then in the next step choose the GetFootballers() method.Click Finish to complete the steps of the wizzard.Build and Run your application.  10) Obviously you will not see any records coming back from your database, because we have not inserted anything. The database is created, though.Have a look at the picture below.  11) Now let's change the POCO class. Let's add a new property to the Footballer.cs class.        public int Age { get; set; } Build and run your application again. You will receive an error. Have a look at the picture below 12) That was to be expected.EF Code First Migrations is not activated by default. We have to activate them manually and configure them according to your needs. We will open the Package Manager Console from the Tools menu within Visual Studio 2012.Then we will activate the EF Code First Migration Features by writing the command “Enable-Migrations”.  Have a look at the picture below. This adds a new folder Migrations in our project. A new auto-generated class Configuration.cs is created.Another class is also created [CURRENTDATE]_InitialCreate.cs and added to our project.The Configuration.cs  is shown in the picture below. The [CURRENTDATE]_InitialCreate.cs is shown in the picture below  13) ??w we are ready to migrate the changes in the database. We need to run the Add-Migration Age command in Package Manager ConsoleAdd-Migration will scaffold the next migration based on changes you have made to your model since the last migration was created.In the Migrations folder, the file 201211201231066_Age.cs is created.Have a look at the picture below to see the newly generated file and its contents. Now we can run the Update-Database command in Package Manager Console .See the picture above.Code First Migrations will compare the migrations in our Migrations folder with the ones that have been applied to the database. It will see that the Age migration needs to be applied, and run it.The EFMigrations.CodeFirst.FootballeDBContext database is now updated to include the Age column in the Footballers table.Build and run your application.Everything will work fine now.Have a look at the picture below to see the migrations applied to our table. 14) We may want it to automatically upgrade the database (by applying any pending migrations) when the application launches.Let's add another property to our Poco class.          public string TShirtNo { get; set; }We want this change to migrate automatically to the database.We go to the Configuration.cs we enable automatic migrations.     public Configuration()        {            AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = true;        } In the Page_Load event handling routine we have to register the MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion database initializer. A database initializer simply contains some logic that is used to make sure the database is setup correctly.   protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)        {            Database.SetInitializer(new MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion<FootballerDBContext, Configuration>());        } Build and run your application. It will work fine. Have a look at the picture below to see the migrations applied to our table in the database. Hope it helps!!!  

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 20, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 20, 2011Popular ReleasesBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC: BlogEngine.NET Hosting - Click Here! 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! This is a Release Candidate version for BlogEngine.NET 2.5. The most current, stable version of BlogEngine.NET is version 2.0. Find out more about the BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC here. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. Also, please note at this time the Mercurial source code repository on the Source Code tab is having issues, but will be fixed shortly. I...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: All-In-One Code Framework 2011-06-19: Alternatively, you can install Sample Browser or Sample Browser VS extension, and download the code samples from Sample Browser. Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for Windows Azure Sample Description Owner CSAzureStartupTask The sample demonstrates using the startup tasks to install the prerequisites or to modify configuration settings for your environment in Windows Azure Rafe Wu ...Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.40: This is a RTW release which adds new features to v5.0.26 RTW. Support for multiple FacebookMediaObjects in one request. Allow FacebookMediaObjects in batch requests. Removes support for Cassini WebServer (visual studio inbuilt web server). Better support for unit testing and mocking. updated SimpleJson to v0.6 Refer to CHANGES.txt for details. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Multiple file uploads in Batch Requests Faceb...Candescent NUI: Candescent NUI (7774): This is the binary version of the source code in change set 7774.Media Companion: MC 3.408b weekly: Some minor fixes..... Fixed messagebox coming up during batch scrape Added <originaltitle></originaltitle> to movie nfo's - when a new movie is scraped, the original title will be set as the returned title. The end user can of course change the title in MC, however the original title will not change. The original title can be seen by hovering over the movie title in the right pane of the main movie tab. To update all of your current nfo's to add the original title the same as your current ...NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: NLog 2.0 Release Candidate: Release notes for NLog 2.0 RC can be found at http://nlog-project.org/nlog-2-rc-release-notesGendering Add-In for Microsoft Office Word 2010: Gendering Add-In: This is the first stable Version of the Gendering Add-In. Unzip the package and start "setup.exe". The .reg file shows how to config an alternate path for suggestion table.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.1 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: This version adds tool tips. Almost every picture box you mouse over will tell you what item is in that box. I have also cleaned up the GUI a little more to make things easier on my end. There are various bug fixes including ones associated with opening different characters in the same instance of the program. As always, please bring any bugs you find to my attention.Kinect Paint: KinectPaint V1.0: This is version 1.0 of Kinect Paint. To run it, follow the steps: Install the Kinect SDK for Windows (available at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx) Connect your Kinect device to the computer and to the power. Download the Zip file. Unblock the Zip file by right clicking on it, and pressing the Unblock button in the file properties (if available). Extract the content of the Zip file. Run KinectPaint.exe.CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET - 0.9.7 Beta: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 3.5 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. Samples in <root>\src\Lib\CommonLibrary.NET\Samples CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.7Documentation 6738 6503 New 6535 Enhancements 6583 6737DropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.2: Public sub-folders are now monitored for changes as well (thanks to mcm69) Automatic public sync folder detection (thanks to mcm69) Non-Latin and special characters encoded correctly in URLs Pop-ups are now slot-based (use first free slot and will never be overlapped — test it while previewing timeout) Public sync folder setting is hidden when auto-detected Timeout interval is displayed in popup previews A lot of major and minor code refactoring performed .NET Framework 4.0 Client...Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.3.1: Update June 20th Removed "Draw Markers" checkbox from main window because of redundancy/confusing. (Select all or no items from the Settings tab for the same effect.) Fixed Marker preferences not being saved. It is now possible to render more than one map without having to restart the application. World file will not be locked while the world is being rendered. Note: The World Viewer might render an inaccurate map or even crash if Terraria decides to modify the World file during the pro...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.1.5 RC: Added Extended Dropdown allows a prompt item to be inserted as first element. RequiredAttribute, if present, trggers if no element is chosen Client side javascript function to set/get the values of DateTimeInput, TypedTextBox, TypedEditDisplay, and to bind/unbind a "change" handler The selected page in the pager is applied the attribute selected-page="selected" that can be used in the definition of CSS rules to style the selected page items controls now interpret a null value as an empr...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.0 CTP 1: Umbraco 5 Community Technology Preview Umbraco 5 will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out our first CTP of version 5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a quick low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video here. What's in the v5 CTP box? This is a preview version of version 5 and includes support for the following familiar Umbr...Ribbon Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Browser (1.0.514.30): Initial releaseCoding4Fun Kinect Toolkit: Coding4Fun.Kinect Toolkit: Version 1.0Kinect Mouse Cursor: Kinect Mouse Cursor v1.0: The initial release of the Kinect Mouse Cursor project!patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 11 - June 14, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Updated "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "jQuery UI Widget" chapter. Updated "Widget QuickStart" appendix and code. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separat...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.2: Build: 1.2.41 Published: 6/14/2010 How to Install Orchard To install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx. Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.2.41.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents o...Snippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.4.0: Snippet Designer 1.4.0 for Visual Studio 2010 Change logSnippet Explorer ChangesReworked language filter UI to work better in the side bar. Added result count drop down which lets you choose how many results to see. Language filter and result count choices are persisted after Visual Studio is closed. Added file name to search criteria. Search is now case insensitive. Snippet Editor Changes Snippet Editor ChangesAdded menu option for the $end$ symbol which indicates where the c...New Projects.NET Dev Tools Dashboard: .NET Dev Tools Dashboard is a WPF application that implements the Prism 4 standards. Modules can be added at runtime and after install of the base Dashboard shell. The first module is a WPF Gui for NAnt based on Colin Svingen's Gui for NAnt open source app for Windows Forms.Chutzpah - A JavaScript Test Runner: Chutzpah helps you integrate JavaScript unit testing into your website. It enables you to run JavaScript unit tests from the command line and from inside of Visual Studio. It also supports running in the TeamCity continuous integration server.Cow connect: Ziel des Projektes Cow connect, ist es ein Tool zu schrieben das Verschiedene Datenbanken, unterschiedlicher Herdenmanagement Tool z.b: Helm Multikuh, Westfalia C21, Holdi,…. Synchron zu halten. oder eine neue Datenbank zu GenerrierenCqrs CWDNUG Demo: A very simple CQRS demo for a presentation at the Canary Wharf Dot Net User Group. Uses Ncqrs, ASP.NET MVC 3. Not best practices - just something to get your teeth into if you're new to CQRS and Event Sourcing.Down123: down123EssionCalendar: EssionCal EssionCalGuardian: Protects reference type parameters and return values from NULL values.Honest Flex Time Management System: A Japanese time management system to handle worker hourlies. Will include some basic reporting functions as well.iStatServer.NET: Server implementation for iPhone iStat app. Windows analogue to iStat Server on OS x or iStatd on linux/solaris. Keolis Service Wrapper: Keolis Service WrapperKinectContrib: A set of extensions and helpers that will facilitate the use of the Microsoft Kinect motion sensor with the Kinect SDK.kingdomwp7: kingdomwp7Laboratório de Engenharia de Software - Projeto: Criado para estudar e aplicar novas tecnologias web.Multi Touch Digit OCR With Matlab Neural Network Wpf Project: Multi Touch Digit OCR Project is a wpf project that works on multi touch devices but it works well on normal devices , this project uses matlab core , that creates 4 feed forward neural network and train them with Back Propagation Algorithm for detecting numbers that you draw .PhoneGap Extensions - Alpha Version: This project was created to solve some issues about PhoneGap. The first issue to solve is how to reuse HTML code through include files. SABnzbd UI: This application is a Windows 7 enabled UI for SABnzbd, so that you don't have to navigate to the website, but instead you can view a slick UI on your desktop.SP:Social: A community project for providing integration points between SharePoint and other social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Live etc.Whisk: An extremely simplistic but cross-platform network rending environment for Blender.Windows phone 7, Game framewok: Windows phone 7, Game framewokWP7 - Multi Select Wrapped ListBox: Its a WP 7.1 project which contains a list box that can wrap listBoxItems and can scroll vertically.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 20, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 20, 2010New ProjectsaMaze Mapa Generator: Parte do Projeto aMazeASP.Net RIA Controls: Simple ASP.Net server controls to integrate Flash and Silverlight controls into your web applications. Included controls don't use any JavaScript,...BMap.NET: BMaps.NET is a .NET application written in C#, for access Bing Maps from your computer without web browsers. With it you can access to Bing Maps an...DaliNet: A .NET API for the Tridonic.Atco DALI USB device.Fabrica7: This is the main project of Fabrica 7 Corp.Image Ripper: A Winform application parse & fetch various HD pictures in specific photo galleries.IoCWrap: Provides interfaces which wrap various IoC container implementations so that it is possible to switch to a different provider without changing any ...NetSockets: NetSockets is a .NET class library that provides easy-to-use, multi-threaded, event-based, client and server network communication.Network Backup: Network Backup is a home and small company backup solution for workstations and a backup server. It incorporates a backup service, scheduler, data ...NUnit.Specs: Specification extensions for NUnit.Nutrivida: Sistema para avaliação de especialização.OHTB Snake: OHTB Snake is a multiplayer game. In this incarnation, snakes may eat 3 types of powerups: standard berries, causing them to grow; sawberries, caus...Playground TDrouen: Tjerk's PlaygroundPower Plan Chooser: This is my first endeavor into a C# Windows application with XAML. The program sits in the notification area (task bar) and lets you quickly activa...Search IMDB in C#: In lack of an IMDB API most of us resort to screen scraping utilities to query the Internet Movie Database. This one is written in C# (.NET 2.0 sta...SIGPRO Desktop: FUNCERNSql2008 PerfMonCounter Fix: Small console application to Fix the SQL 2008 Express Edition installation error: Pequena aplicação para Corrigir o seguinte erro de Instalação do...TwiztedTracker: TwiztedTracker designed to make your bug tracking easy.UmbracoXsltLogHelper: I needed a way to easily add log rows from my xslt macros, and added a single-line-extension for that reason. Then I played around with the umbraco...VisualStock: VisualStock is stock data visualization, analysis application build on the Micorsoft Composite Application Library.WHS File Mover: A Windows Home Server Plugin to move files from a local directory ("drop" or "staging" directory to a folder share)XML based Content Deployment in SharePoint: XML based Content Deployment in Sharepoint helps you to easy deploy content into SharePoint, including webs, lists, items, files and folder. You wi...New ReleasesASP.Net RIA Controls: Version 1.0 Beta: The first functionnal version.BMap.NET: BMap.NET 1: This is the 1st version of BMap.NETDigital Media Processing Project 1: Image Processor: Image Processor 1.0: All features implemented. Added: clipping imageFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.1.0: Version 1.3.1.0 Added a cancel button to marriage and children IGI Searches Opening Results window now automatically shows first record Updated IGI...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.5 Released: Hi, This release contains fix for the following bug: * Chart threw exception if ZoomingEnabled property was set to True at real-time. You ca...Homework Helper: Homework Helper v.1.1: Sorry but the latest release didn't seem to be the latest. This should be the right one!Image Ripper: Image Ripper: Image Ripper based on HtmlAgilityPack and GData library.ManPowerEngine: 0.1: UpdatesSound System added. Bitmap Collider in Physics System works now. Improved the performance of HTTP download in images Physics Framework...NIPO Data Processing Component Framework: NIPO 1.0: The first release of NIPO. Includes the NIPO binary dll and documentation. This release does not include a starter application since it is still in...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG2010 Drop7: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices ****************************************** ***************************************...Photosynth Point Cloud Exporter: Photosynth Point Cloud Exporter 1.0.2: Photosynth webservice reference updated to work with the new site OBJ file format support added (Note: this format doesn't support vertex colors)Power Plan Chooser: Power Plan Chooser 1.0.0: Power Plan Chooser is a small utility that sits in the notification area (task bar) in Windows 7 and allows the user to quickly activate one of the...Restart Explorer: RestartExplorer Release 1.00.0001: Initial release: Start, stop and restart Windows Explorer with this utility.Search IMDB in C#: Search IMDB 1.0: Source code included with compiled example.SIMD Detector: 3rd Release: Added Intel AES instruction check Added a CSharp Winform NetSIMDDetector application. Changes the red ball and green ball images to red cross a...Sql2008 PerfMonCounter Fix: Sql2008FIx_PerfMonCounter.zip: Small console application to Fix the SQL 2008 Express Edition installation error: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300956 Rule Name PerfMonCounter...UmbracoXsltLogHelper: 0.9 Working Beta: First version. XsltLogHelper09 is the installable package.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30319.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF RIA Services Contrib: RIA Services Contrib RC Release: This version is recompiled against the RC release of WCF RIA Services.XML based Content Deployment in SharePoint: SPContentDeployment 1.0.0.0: The first link contains the resources and a sample project. The second link contains everything included in the first package and an additional fo...Yet Another GPS: YAGPS Alfa.2: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows Mobile Speed Guage, Sat Count number, KML for google map file formatZGuideTV.NET: ZGuideTV.NET 0.92: Vendredi 19 mars 2010 (ZGuideTV.NET bêta 9 build 0.92) - English below Corrections : - Gestion de certains contrôles dans l'écran principal. - Div...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

  Read the article

• Windows Azure Evolution &ndash; Preview Developer Portal

  - by Shaun

  With the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June, there are many new features and updates in windows azure platform. In the coming several posts I will try to cover some of them. And in the first post here I would like to just have a quick walkthrough of the new preview developer portal.   History of the Developer Portal If you have been working with windows azure since 2009 or 2010, you should remember the first version of the developer portal. It was built in HTML with very limited features. I have the impression when I was using is old one. The layout is not that attractive and you have very limited features. On November, 2010 alone with the SDK 1.3 release, the developer portal was getting a big jump. In order to give more usability and features this it turned to be built on Silverlight. Hence it runs like a desktop application with many windows, lists, commands and context menus. From 2010 till now many features were involved into this portal, such as the remote desktop, co-admin, virtual connect, VM role, etc.. And the portal itself became more and more complicated. But it brought some problems by using the Silverlight. The first one is the browser capability. As you know in most mobile and tablet device the browser doesn’t allow the rich content plugin, such as Flash and Silverlight. This means people cannot open and configure their azure services from their iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone, etc., even though what they need may just be restart a hosted service, or view the status of their databases. Another problem is the performance. Silverlight provides rich experience to the users, but also needs more bandwidth. So in this upgrade the preview developer portal will be back to use HTML, with JavaScript, as a mobile friendly, cross browser, interactively web site.   Preview Portal vs. Silverlight Portal Before I started to talk about the new preview portal I’d better highlight that, this preview portal is a PREVIEW version, which means even though you can do almost all features that already in the old one, as long as some cool new features I will mention in the coming several posts, there are something still under developed and migrated. So sometimes you need to switch back to the old one. For example, in preview portal there is no co-admin manage function, no remote desktop function and the SQL database manage function will take you back to the old SQL Azure Manage Portal. But as Microsoft said these missing features will be moved in the preview portal in the couple of next few months. Since the public URL of the developer portal, https://windows.azure.com/, had been changed to point to this preview one, you need to click to preview button on top of the page and click the “Take me to the previous portal” link.   Overview There are four parts in the preview portal. On the top is the header which shows the account you are currently logging in. If you click on the header it will show the top menu of windows azure, where you can navigate to the windows azure home page, the price information page, community and account, etc.. The navigation bar is on the left hand side, with the categories listed below. ALL ITEMS All items in your windows azure account, includes the web sites, services, databases, etc.. WEB SITES The web sites in your windows azure account. It will only show the web sites you have. The linked resources will be shown if you drill down into a web site. VIRTUAL MACHINES The virtual machines that you had been deployed to azure. CLOUD SERVICES All windows azure hosted services in your account. SQL DATABASES All SQL databases (SQL Azure) in your account. STORAGE All windows azure storage services in your account. NETWORKS The virtual network (Windows Azure Connect) you had been created. The available items will be listed in the main part of the page based on which category your currently selected. If there’s no item it will show the link to you to quick create. At the bottom of the page there will be the command and information bar. Based on what is selected and what is performed by the user, it will show the related information and commands. For example, in the image below when I was creating a new web site, the information bar told me that my web site is being provisioned; and there are two commands in the command bar. And once it ready the command bar will show some commands that I can do to my new web site. The “Web Sites” is a new feature introduced alone with this upgrade. It gives us an easier and quicker way to establish a website from the scratch or from some existing library. I will introduce it more details in the coming next post. Also in the command bar you can create a service by clicking the NEW button. It will slide the creation panel up to you.   Where’s My Hosted Services The Windows Azure Hosted Services had been renamed to the Cloud Services. Create a new service would be very easy. Just click the NEW button at the bottom of the page, and select the CLOUD SERVICE and QIUICK CREATE. This will create a blank hosted service without deployment and certificate. It just needs you to specify the service URL and the affinity/region. Then the service will be shown in the list. If you clicked the item all information will be shown in the main part. Since there’s no package deployed to this service so currently we cannot see any information about it. But we can upload the package by using the command at the bottom. And as you can see, we could manage the configuration, instances, certificates and we can scale up and down (change the VM size), in and out (increase and decrease the instance count) to our service. Assuming I had created an ASP.NET MVC 3 web role project in Visual Studio and completed the package. Then I can click the UPLOAD button in this page to deploy my package. In the popping up window I just specify my deployment name, package file and configure file. Also I can check the box below so that it will NOT warn me if only one instance of this deployment. Once we clicked the OK button our package will be uploaded and provisioned by the platform. After a while we can see the service was ready from the information bar. We can have the basic information about this service and deployment if we to the dashboard page. For example the usage overview diagram, status, URL, public IP address, etc.. In the configure page we can view and change the CSCFG content such as the monitor setting, connection strings, OS family. In scale page we can increase and decrease the count of the instances. And in the instances page we can view all instances status. And, if your services is using some SQL databases and storages they will be shown as the linked resources under the linked resources page. And you can manage the certificates of this service as well under the certificates page.   How About My Storage Services The storage service can be managed by clicking into the STORAGES link in the navigation bar. And we can create a new storage service from the NEW button. After specify the storage name and region it will be previsioned by the platform. If you want to copy or manage the storage key you can just click the Manage Keys button at the bottom, which is very easy. What I want to highlight here is that, you can monitor your storage service by enabling the monitor configuration. Click the storage item in the list and navigate to the configure page. As you can see in the page you can enable the monitoring for blob, table and queue. And you can also enable the logging when any requests come to the storage. But as the tooltip shown in the page, enabling the monitoring and logging will increase the usage of the storage, which means increase the bill of them. So make sure you enable them properly.   And My SQL Databases (SQL Azure) The last thing I want to quick introduce is the SQL databases, which was formally named SQL Azure. You can create a new SQL Database Server and a new database by clicking the ADD button under the SQL Database navigation item. In the popping up windows just specify the database name, the edition, size, collation and the server. You can select an existing SQL Database Server if you have, or cerate a new one. If you selected to create a new server, there will be another step you need to do, which is specify the server login, password and the region. Once it ready you can mange your databases as well as the servers in the portal. In a particular server you can update the firewall settings in its Configure page. So, What Else There are some other area on the preview portal I didn’t cover, such as the virtual machines, virtual network and web sites. Regarding the virtual machines and web sites I will talk about them in the future separated post. Regarding the virtual network, it the Windows Azure Connect we are familiar with. But as I mention in the beginning of this post, the preview portal is still under developed. Some features are not available here. For example, you cannot manage the co-admin of your subscriptions, you cannot open the remote desktop on your hosted services, and you cannot navigate to the Windows Azure Service Bus, Access Control and Caching, which formally named Windows Azure AppFabric directly. In these cases you need to navigate back to the old portal. So in the coming several months we might need to use both these two sites.   Summary In this post I quick introduced the new windows azure developer portal. Since it had been rearranged and renamed I demonstrated some features that existing in the old portal, such as how to create and deploy a hosted service, how to provision a storage service and SQL database. All features in the old portal had been, is being and will be migrated into this new portal, but some of them were in a different category and page we need to figure out.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

  Read the article

• ODEE Green Field (Windows) Part 5 - Deployment and Validation

  - by AndyL-Oracle

  And here we are, almost finished with our installation of Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition ("ODEE") in a Windows green field environment. Let's recap what we've done so far: In part 1, I went over the basic process that I intended to show with installing an ODEE on a green field server. I walked you through the basic installation of Oracle 11g database In part 2, I covered the installation of WebLogic application server. In part 3, I showed you how to install SOA Suite for WebLogic. In part 4, we did the first part of the installation of ODEE itself. What remains after all of that, is the deployment of the ODEE components onto the database and application server - so let's get to it! DATABASE First, we'll deploy the schemas to the database. The schemas are created during the ODEE installation according to the responses provided during the install process. To deploy the schemas, you'll need to login to the database server in your green field environment. Open a command line and CD into ODEE_HOME\documaker\database\oracle11g.Run SQLPLUS as SYSDBA and execute dmkr_admin.sql:  sqlplus / as sysdba @dmkr_admin.sql Execute dmkr_asline.sql, dmkr_admin_correspondence_example.sql.  If you require additional languages, run the appropriate SQL scripts (e.g. dmkr_asline_es.sql for Spanish). APPLICATION SERVER Next, we'll deploy the WebLogic domain and it's components - Documaker web services, Documaker Interactive, Documaker dashboard, and more. To deploy the components, you'll need to login to the application server in your green field environment. 1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to ODEE_HOME\documaker\j2ee\weblogic\oracle11g\scripts.2. Using a text editor such as Notepad++, modify weblogic_installation_properties and set location of MIDDLEWARE_HOME and ODEE HOME. If you have used the defaults you’ll probably need to change the E: to C: and that’s it. Save the changes.3. Continuing in the same directory, use your text editor to modify set_middleware_env.cmd and set the drive and path to MIDDLEWARE_HOME. If you have used the defaults you’ll probably need to just change E: to C: and that’s it. Save the changes.4. In the same directory, execute wls_create_domain.cmd by double-clicking it. This should run to completion. If it does not, review any errors and correct them, and rerun the script.5. In the same directory, execute wls_add_correspondence.cmd by double-clicking it - again this should run to completion. 6. Next, we'll start the AdminServer - this is the main WebLogic domain server. To start it, use Windows Explorer and navigate to MIDDLEWARE_HOME\user_projects\domains\idocumaker_domain. Double-click startWebLogic.cmd and the server startup will begin. Once you see output that indicates that the server status changed to RUNNING you may proceed.  a. Note: if you saw database connection errors, you probably didn’t make sure your database name and connection type match. You can change this manually in the WebLogic Console. Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:7001/console (replace localhost with the name of your application server host if you aren't opening the browser on the server), and login with the the weblogic credential you provided in the ODEE installation process. b. Once you're logged in, open Services?Data Sources. Select dmkr_admin and click Connection Pool.  c. The end of the URL should match the connection type you chose. If you chose ServiceName, the URL should be: jdbc:oracle:thin:@//<hostname>:1521/<serviceName> and if you chose SID, the URL should be: jdbc:oracle:thin:@//<hostname>:1521/<SIDname> d. An example serviceName is a fully qualified DNS-style name, e.g. "idmaker.us.oracle.com". (It does not need to actually resolve in DNS). An example SID is just a name, e.g. IDMAKER. e. Save the change and repeat for the data source dmkr_asline.  f. You will also need to make the same changes in the ODEE_HOME/documaker/docfactory/config/context/.bindings file - open the file in a text editor, locate the URL lines and make the appropriate change, then save the file.  7. Back in the ODEE_HOME\documaker\j2ee\weblogic\oracle11g\scripts directory, execute create_users_groups.cmd. 8. In the same directory, execute create_users_groups_correspondence_example.cmd. 9. Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:7001/jpsquery. Replace localhost with the name of your application server host if you aren't running the browser on the application server. If you changed the default port for the AdminServer from 7001, use the port you changed it to. You should see output like this: 10. Start the WebLogic managed servers by opening a command prompt and navigating to MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/idocumaker_domain/bin/. When you start the servers listed below, you will be prompted to enter the WebLogic credentials to start the server. You can prevent this by providing the credential in the startManagedwebLogic.cmd file for the WLS_USER and WLS_PASS values. Note that the credential will be stored in cleartext. To start the server, type in the command shown. a. Start the JMS Server: ./startManagedWebLogic.cmd jms_server b. Start Dashboard/Documaker Administrator: ./startManagedWebLogic.cmd dmkr_server c. Start Documaker Interactive for Correspondence: ./startManagedWebLogic.cmd idm_server SOA Composites  If you're planning on testing out the approval process components of BPEL that can be used with Documaker Interactive, then use the following steps to deploy the SOA composites. If you're not going to use BPEL, you can skip to the next section.1. Stop the servers listed in the previous section (Step 10) in the reverse order that they were started.2. Run the Domain configuration command: navigate to and execute MIDDLEWARE_HOME/wlserver_10.3/common/bin/config.cmd.3. Select Extend and click next. 4. Select the iDocumaker Domain and click Next. 5. Select the Oracle SOA Suite – 11.1.1.0 (this may automatically select other components which is OK). Click Next. 6. View the Configure JDBC resources screen. You should not make any changes. Click Next. 7. Check both connections and click Test Connections. After successful test, click Next. If the tests fail, something is broken. Go back to configure JDBC resources and check your service name/SID. 8. Check all schemas. Set a password (will be the same for all schemas). Enter the database information (service name, host name, port). Click Next. 9. Connections should test successfully. If not, go back and fix any errors. Click Next. 10. Click Next to pass through Optional Configuration. 11. Click Extend. 12. Click Done. 13. Open a terminal window and navigate to/execute: ODEE_HOME/documaker/j2ee/weblogic/oracle11g/bpel/antbuild.cmd14. Start the WebLogic Servers – AdminServer, jms_server, dmkr_server, idm_server. If you forgot how to do this, see the previous section Step 10. Note: if you previously changed the startManagedWebLogic.cmd script for WLS_USER and WLS_PASS you will need to make those changes again. 15. Start the WebLogic server soa_server1: MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/idocumaker_domain/bin/startManagedWebLogic.cmd soa_server116. Open a browser to http://localhost:7001/console and login. 17. Navigate to Services?Data Sources and select DMKR_ASLINE. 18. Click the Targets tab. Check soa_server1, then click Save. Repeat for the DMKR_ADMIN data source. 19. Open a command prompt and navigate to ODEE_HOME/j2ee/weblogic/oracle11g/scripts, then execute deploy_soa.cmd. That's it! (As if that wasn't enough?) DOCUMAKER Deploy the sample MRL resources by navigating to/executing ODEE_HOME/documaker/mstrres/dmres/deploysamplemrl.bat. You should see approximately 500 resources deployed into the database. Start the Factory Services. Start?Run?services.msc. Locate the service named "ODDF xxxx" and right-click, select Start. Note that each Assembly Line has a separate Factory setup, including its own Factory service and Docupresentment service. The services are named for the assembly line and the machine on which they are installed (because you could have multiple machines servicing a single assembly line, so this allows for easy scripting to control all the services if you choose to do so. Repeat for the Docupresentment service. Note that each Assembly Line has a separate Docupresentment. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to ODEE_HOME/documaker/mstrres/dmres/input and select one of the XML files, and copy it into ODEE_HOME/documaker/hotdirectory. Note: if you chose a different hot directory during installation, copy the file there instead. Momentarily you should see the XML file disappear! Open browser and navigate to http://localhost:10001/DocumakerDashboard (previous versions 12.0-12.2 use http://localhost:10001/dashboard) and verify that job processed successfully. Note that some transactions may fail if you do not have a properly configured email server, and this is ok. You can set up a simple SMTP server (just search the internet for "SMTP developer" and you'll get several to choose from.  So... that's it? Where are we at this point? You now have a completely functional ODEE installation, from soup to nuts as they say. You can further expand your installation by doing some of the following activities: clustering WebLogic services configuring WebLogic for redundancy configuring Oracle 11g for RAC adding additional Factory servers for redundancy/processing capacity setting up a real MRL (instead of the sample resources) testing Documaker Web Services for job submission and more!  I certainly hope you've enjoyed this and find it useful. If you find yourself running into trouble, visit the Oracle Community for Documaker - there is plenty of activity there and you can ask questions. For more concentrated assistance, you can engage an Oracle consultant who is a subject matter expert to assist you. Feel free to email me [andy (dot) little (at) oracle (dot) com] and I can connect you with the appropriate resource to get started. Best of luck! -Andy 

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – A Quick Look at Logging and Ideas around Logging

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to the T-SQL Tuesday post on Logging. When someone talks about logging, personally I get lots of ideas about it. I have seen logging as a very generic term. Let me ask you this question first before I continue writing about logging. What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear word “Logging”? Now ask the same question to the guy standing next to you. I am pretty confident that you will get  a different answer from different people. I decided to do this activity and asked 5 SQL Server person the same question. Question: What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear the word “Logging”? Strange enough I got a different answer every single time. Let me just list what answer I got from my friends. Let us go over them one by one. Output Clause The very first person replied output clause. Pretty interesting answer to start with. I see what exactly he was thinking. SQL Server 2005 has introduced a new OUTPUT clause. OUTPUT clause has access to inserted and deleted tables (virtual tables) just like triggers. OUTPUT clause can be used to return values to client clause. OUTPUT clause can be used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to identify the actual rows affected by these statements. Here are some references for Output Clause: OUTPUT Clause Example and Explanation with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE Reasons for Using Output Clause – Quiz Tips from the SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Output Clause in Simple Examples Error Logs I was expecting someone to mention Error logs when it is about logging. The error log is the most looked place when there is any error either with the application or there is an error with the operating system. I have kept the policy to check my server’s error log every day. The reason is simple – enough time in my career I have figured out that when I am looking at error logs I find something which I was not expecting. There are cases, when I noticed errors in the error log and I fixed them before end user notices it. Other common practices I always tell my DBA friends to do is that when any error happens they should find relevant entries in the error logs and document the same. It is quite possible that they will see the same error in the error log  and able to fix the error based on the knowledge base which they have created. There can be many different kinds of error log files exists in SQL Server as well – 1) SQL Server Error Logs 2) Windows Event Log 3) SQL Server Agent Log 4) SQL Server Profile Log 5) SQL Server Setup Log etc. Here are some references for Error Logs: Recycle Error Log – Create New Log file without Server Restart SQL Error Messages Change Data Capture I got surprised with this answer. I think more than the answer I was surprised by the person who had answered me this one. I always thought he was expert in HTML, JavaScript but I guess, one should never assume about others. Indeed one of the cool logging feature is Change Data Capture. Change Data Capture records INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs applied to SQL Server tables, and makes a record available of what changed, where, and when, in simple relational ‘change tables’ rather than in an esoteric chopped salad of XML. These change tables contain columns that reflect the column structure of the source table you have chosen to track, along with the metadata needed to understand the changes that have been made. Here are some references for Change Data Capture: Introduction to Change Data Capture (CDC) in SQL Server 2008 Tuning the Performance of Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008 Download Script of Change Data Capture (CDC) CDC and TRUNCATE – Cannot truncate table because it is published for replication or enabled for Change Data Capture Dynamic Management View (DMV) I like this answer. If asked I would have not come up with DMV right away but in the spirit of the original question, I think DMV does log the data. DMV logs or stores or records the various data and activity on the SQL Server. Dynamic management views return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems, and tune performance. One can get plethero of information from DMVs – High Availability Status, Query Executions Details, SQL Server Resources Status etc. Here are some references for Dynamic Management View (DMV): SQL SERVER – Denali – DMV Enhancement – sys.dm_exec_query_stats – New Columns DMV – sys.dm_os_windows_info – Information about Operating System DMV – sys.dm_os_wait_stats Explanation – Wait Type – Day 3 of 28 DMV sys.dm_exec_describe_first_result_set_for_object – Describes the First Result Metadata for the Module Transaction Log Impact Detection Using DMV – dm_tran_database_transactions Log Files I almost flipped with this final answer from my friend. This should be probably the first answer. Yes, indeed log file logs the SQL Server activities. One can write infinite things about log file. SQL Server uses log file with the extension .ldf to manage transactions and maintain database integrity. Log file ensures that valid data is written out to database and system is in a consistent state. Log files are extremely useful in case of the database failures as with the help of full backup file database can be brought in the desired state (point in time recovery is also possible). SQL Server database has three recovery models – 1) Simple, 2) Full and 3) Bulk Logged. Each of the model uses the .ldf file for performing various activities. It is very important to take the backup of the log files (along with full backup) as one never knows when backup of the log file come into the action and save the day! How to Stop Growing Log File Too Big Reduce the Virtual Log Files (VLFs) from LDF file Log File Growing for Model Database – model Database Log File Grew Too Big master Database Log File Grew Too Big SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008 Can I just say I loved this month’s T-SQL Tuesday Question. It really provoked very interesting conversation around me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• SonicOS Enhanced 5.8.1.2 L2TP VPN Authentication Failed

  - by Dean A. Vassallo

  I have a SonicWall TZ 215 running SonicOS Enhanced 5.8.1.2-6o. I have configured the L2TP VPN using the default crypto suite ESP: 3DES/HMAC SHA1 (IKE). Proposals are as such: IKE (Phase 1) Proposal DH Group: Group 2 Encryption: 3DES Authentication: SHA1 Life Time (seconds): 28800 Ipsec (Phase 2) Proposal Protocol: ESP Encryption: 3DES Authentication: SHA1 Enable Perfect Forward Secrecy DISABLED Life Time (seconds): 28800 When attempting to connect via my Mac OS X client I get an authentication error. It appears to pass the pre-authentication but fails to complete. I am at a complete loss. I reconfigured from scratch multiple times...used simple usernames and passwords to verify this wasn't a miskeyed password issue. I have Here are the logs (noted IP has been removed for privacy): 7/1/13 8:19:05.174 PM pppd[1268]: setup_security_context server port: 0x1503 7/1/13 8:19:05.190 PM pppd[1268]: publish_entry SCDSet() failed: Success! 7/1/13 8:19:05.191 PM pppd[1268]: publish_entry SCDSet() failed: Success! 7/1/13 8:19:05.191 PM pppd[1268]: pppd 2.4.2 (Apple version 727.1.1) started by dean, uid 501 7/1/13 8:19:05.192 PM pppd[1268]: L2TP connecting to server ‘0.0.0.0’ (0.0.0.0)... 7/1/13 8:19:05.193 PM pppd[1268]: IPSec connection started 7/1/13 8:19:05.208 PM racoon[1269]: accepted connection on vpn control socket. 7/1/13 8:19:05.209 PM racoon[1269]: Connecting. 7/1/13 8:19:05.209 PM racoon[1269]: IPSec Phase 1 started (Initiated by me). 7/1/13 8:19:05.209 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 1). 7/1/13 8:19:05.209 PM racoon[1269]: >>>>> phase change status = Phase 1 started by us 7/1/13 8:19:05.231 PM racoon[1269]: >>>>> phase change status = Phase 1 started by peer 7/1/13 8:19:05.231 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 2). 7/1/13 8:19:05.234 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 3). 7/1/13 8:19:05.293 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 4). 7/1/13 8:19:05.295 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 5). 7/1/13 8:19:05.315 PM racoon[1269]: IKEv1 Phase 1 AUTH: success. (Initiator, Main-Mode Message 6). 7/1/13 8:19:05.315 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 6). 7/1/13 8:19:05.315 PM racoon[1269]: IKEv1 Phase 1 Initiator: success. (Initiator, Main-Mode). 7/1/13 8:19:05.315 PM racoon[1269]: IPSec Phase 1 established (Initiated by me). 7/1/13 8:19:06.307 PM racoon[1269]: IPSec Phase 2 started (Initiated by me). 7/1/13 8:19:06.307 PM racoon[1269]: >>>>> phase change status = Phase 2 started 7/1/13 8:19:06.308 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 1). 7/1/13 8:19:06.332 PM racoon[1269]: attribute has been modified. 7/1/13 8:19:06.332 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 2). 7/1/13 8:19:06.332 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 3). 7/1/13 8:19:06.333 PM racoon[1269]: IKEv1 Phase 2 Initiator: success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode). 7/1/13 8:19:06.333 PM racoon[1269]: IPSec Phase 2 established (Initiated by me). 7/1/13 8:19:06.333 PM racoon[1269]: >>>>> phase change status = Phase 2 established 7/1/13 8:19:06.333 PM pppd[1268]: IPSec connection established 7/1/13 8:19:07.145 PM pppd[1268]: L2TP connection established. 7/1/13 8:19:07.000 PM kernel[0]: ppp0: is now delegating en0 (type 0x6, family 2, sub-family 3) 7/1/13 8:19:07.146 PM pppd[1268]: Connect: ppp0 <--> socket[34:18] 7/1/13 8:19:08.709 PM pppd[1268]: MS-CHAPv2 mutual authentication failed. 7/1/13 8:19:08.710 PM pppd[1268]: Connection terminated. 7/1/13 8:19:08.710 PM pppd[1268]: L2TP disconnecting... 7/1/13 8:19:08.711 PM pppd[1268]: L2TP disconnected 7/1/13 8:19:08.711 PM racoon[1269]: IPSec disconnecting from server 0.0.0.0 7/1/13 8:19:08.711 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Information message). 7/1/13 8:19:08.712 PM racoon[1269]: IKEv1 Information-Notice: transmit success. (Delete IPSEC-SA). 7/1/13 8:19:08.712 PM racoon[1269]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Information message). 7/1/13 8:19:08.712 PM racoon[1269]: IKEv1 Information-Notice: transmit success. (Delete ISAKMP-SA). 7/1/13 8:19:08.713 PM racoon[1269]: glob found no matches for path "/var/run/racoon/*.conf" 7/1/13 8:19:08.714 PM racoon[1269]: pfkey DELETE failed: No such file or directory

  Read the article

• Exploring the Excel Services REST API

  - by jamiet

  Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible.  Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in.   The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet 

  Read the article

• How to launch LOV and Date dialogs using the keyboard

  - by frank.nimphius

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Using the ADF Faces JavaScript API, developers can listen for user keyboard input in input components to filter or respond to specific characters or key combination. The JavaScript shown below can be used with an af:clientListener tag on af:inputListOfValues or af:inputDate. At runtime, the JavaScript code determines the component type it is executed on and either opens the LOV dialog or the input Date popup.   <af:resource type="javascript">     /**     * function to launch dialog if cursor is in LOV or     * input date field     * @param evt argument to capture the AdfUIInputEvent object     */   function launchPopUpUsingF8(evt) {      var component = evt.getSource();      if (evt.getKeyCode() == AdfKeyStroke.F8_KEY) {      //check for input LOV component        if (component.getTypeName() == 'AdfRichInputListOfValues') {            AdfLaunchPopupEvent.queue(component, true);            //event is handled on the client. Server does not need            //to be notified            evt.cancel();          }         //check for input Date component               else if (component.getTypeName() == 'AdfRichInputDate') {           //the inputDate af:popup component ID always is ::pop           var popupClientId = component.getAbsoluteLocator() + '::pop';           var popup = component.findComponent(popupClientId);           var hints = {align : AdfRichPopup.ALIGN_END_AFTER,                        alignId : component.getAbsoluteLocator()};           popup.show(hints);           //event is handled on the client. Server does not need           //to be notified           evt.cancel();        }              } } </af:resource> The af:clientListener that calls the JavaScript is added as shown below. <af:inputDate label="Label 1" id="id1">    <af:clientListener method="launchPopUpUsingF8" type="keyDown"/> </af:inputDate> As you may have noticed, the call to open the popup is different for the af:inputListOfValues and the af:inputDate. For the list of values component, an ADF Faces AdfLaunchPopupEvent is queued with the LOV component passed s an argument. Launching the input date popup is a bit more complicate and requires you to lookup the implicit popup dialog and to open it manually. Because the popup is opened manually using the show() method on the af:popup component, the alignment of the dialog also needs to be handled manually. For this, the popup component specifies alignment hints, that for the ALIGN_END_AFTER hint aligns the dialog at the end and below the date component. The align Id hint specifies the component the dialog is relatively positioned to, which of course should be the input date field. The ADF Faces JavaScript API and how to use it is further explained in the Using JavaScript in ADF Faces Rich Client Applications whitepaper available from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/1-2011-javascript-302460.pdf An ADF Insider recording about JavaScript in ADF Faces can be watched from here http://download.oracle.com/otn_hosted_doc/jdeveloper/11gdemos/adf-insider-javascript/adf-insider-javascript.html

  Read the article

• Why It Is So Important to Know Your Customer

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Over the years, I endured enough delayed flights, air turbulence and misadventures in airport security clearance to watch my expectations for the air travel experience fall to abysmally low levels. The extent of my loyalty to any one carrier had more to do with the proximity of the airport parking garage to their particular gate than to any effort on the airline’s part to actually earn and retain my business. That all changed one day when I found myself at the airport hoping to catch a return flight home a few hours earlier than expected, using an airline I had flown with for the first time just that week.  When you travel regularly for business, being able to catch a return flight home that’s even an hour or two earlier than originally scheduled is a big deal. It can mean the difference between having a normal evening with your family and having to sneak in like a cat burglar after everyone is fast asleep. And so I found myself on this particular day hoping to catch an earlier flight home. I approached the gate agent and was told that I could go on standby for their next flight out. Then I asked how much it was going to cost to change the flight, knowing full well that I wouldn’t get reimbursed by my company for any change fees. “Oh, there’s no charge to fly on standby,” the gate agent told me. I made a funny look. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This airline was going to let my fly on standby, at no additional charge, even though I was a new customer with no status or points. It had been years since I’d seen an airline pass up a short term revenue generating opportunity in favor of a long term loyalty generating one.  At that moment, this particular airline gained my loyal business. Since then, this airline has had the opportunity to learn a lot about me. They know where I live, where I fly from, where I usually fly to, and where I like to sit on the plane. In general, I’ve found their customer service to be quite good whether at the airport, via call center and even through social channels. They email me occasionally, and when they do, they demonstrate that they know me by promoting deals for flights from where I live to places that I’d be interested in visiting. And that’s part of why I’m always so puzzled when I visit their website.Does this company with the great service, customer friendly policies, and clean planes demonstrate that they know me at all when I visit their website? The answer is no. Even when I log in using my loyalty program credentials, it’s pretty obvious that they’re presenting the same old home page and same old offers to every single one of their site visitors. I mean, those promotional offers that they’re featuring so prominently  -- they’re for flights that originate thousands of miles from where I live! There’s no way I’d ever book one of those flights and I’m sure I’m not the only one of their customers to feel that way.My reason for recounting this story is not to pick on the one customer experience flaw I've noticed with this particular airline, in fact, they do so many things right that I’ll continue to fly with them. But I did want to illustrate just how glaringly obvious it is to customers today when a touch point they have with a brand is impersonal, unconnected and out of sync. As someone who’s spent a number of years in the web experience management and online marketing space, it particularly peeves me when that out of sync touch point is a brand’s website, perhaps because I know how important it is to make a customer’s online experience relevant and how many powerful tools are available for making a relevant experience a reality. The fact is, delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable or particularly effective in today’s world. Today’s savvy customers expect you to know who they are and to understand their preferences, behavior and relationship with your brand. Not only do they expect you to know about them, but they also expect you to demonstrate this knowledge across all of their touch points with your brand in a consistent and compelling fashion, whether it be on your traditional website, your mobile web presence or through various social channels.Delivering the kind of personalized online experiences that customers want can have tremendous business benefits. This is not just about generating feelings of goodwill and higher customer satisfaction ratings either. More relevant and personalized online experiences boost the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives and the statistics prove this out. Personalized web experiences can help increase online conversion rates by 70% -- that’s a huge number.1  And more than three quarters of consumers indicate that they’ve made additional online purchases based on personalized product recommendations.2Now if only this airline would get on board with delivering a more personalized online customer experience. I’d certainly be happier and more likely to spring for one of their promotional offers. And by targeting relevant offers on their home page to appropriate segments of their site visitors, I bet they’d be happier and generating additional revenue too. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}  ***** If you're interested in hearing more perspectives on the benefits of demonstrating that you know your customers by delivering a more personalized experience, check out this white paper on creating a successful and meaningful customer experience on the web.  Also catch the video below on the business value of CX in attracting new customers featuring Oracle's VP of Customer Experience Strategy, Brian Curran. 1 Search Engine Watch 2 Marketing Charts

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010New ProjectsAlter gear SQL index Management: SQL Index management displays a list of indexes available for the chosen database and allows you to select an individual / group of indexes to be r...ASP League Ladder System: An ASP ladder / league system for online gaming league or real life leagues also.Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator is a software suite to promote computer aided strategy planning. Sports team can visualize their strategy usin...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Simple syntax hightlighting VSX add-in for Boo language in Visual Studio 2010.easySan: easySan zur einfachen Mitgliedsverwaltung im BRKFsUnit: FsUnit makes unit-testing with F# more enjoyable. It adds a special syntax to your favorite .NET testing framework.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog is a simple to use, component based 2D framework for XNA game development. At present it is very early in development and as such is f...miniTodo: WPFでMVVMの練習にてきとうに作ったTODOアプリ 実用は無理です。My Common Library on .NET with CSharp: My Common Library on .NET with CSharp, it conclude database assecc, encrypt string, data caching, StringUtility, thank you for your view.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Ever thought about creating HUGE FILES for future use but felt bad for the wasted memory? Well, SPARSE FILES are the ANSWER! This FSUTIL SPARSE CO...Open SOA Platform: A centralized system for administering applications throught a SOA Enterprise Service Bus: Runtime environment (PROD, DEV, ...) , application and s...P-DBMS: Network and Database ProjectPraiseSight: PraiseSight is supposed to become a practical tool for churches to catalog an present their songs, lyrics and presentations on a beamer. The soluti...Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend is a sample frontend for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 and MDT 2010 Zero Touch. S3Appender (Appender for Log4Net that Uses Amazon S3 For Storing Log Files): The S3Appender is a log4net appender that stores log events in either a MemoryStream or FileStream and sends them to S3 based on time intervals and...sEmit: sEmit (sms emitter) is an application written in C# which was built to send text messages. The project was founded in May 2009 by cansik. It works ...Silverlight RIA Tools: A tool set that generates a full RIA Solutions in Silverlightthommo cannon: Cannon for shooting down ThommosTianjin Polytechnic University Online Judge: Online Judge System Built on Microsoft technologies. Vision & Scope: A distributed OJ Solution on Windows and Cloud. Technologies used or planed...Tinare: Tinare is an byte encryption and decryption alogrithm. The input key is a string password.TinyPlug: Small Plugin Manager, written in C# Allows a project to define supported interfaces, and at runtime add plugins which support (inherit) these in...Utility niconv helps to convert text from one encoding to another: .NET implementation of GUN iconv console converter utility. The niconv program converts text from one encoding to another encoding. In the future r...WareFeed - Software Business Analytics: WareFeed is a simple but effective Software Business Analytics tool written in PHP and compatible others languages such as .NET, Java or Python. It...Y36API1: Semestralni projekt na Y36APINew ReleasesAlter gear SQL index Management: Setup 1.0.0: setup for first alpha releaseASP League Ladder System: ASPLeagueRelease_0_4_1: Release v 0.41Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Version 1.0 InstallerAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10e: Version 1.10e will be the final iteration of version 1 development. Version 2 will begin adding switches and options. Pleae email your suggestio...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Boo syntax VS 2010 - alpha: First release TODO: Multiline comments!Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET 0.6: Updated library, using Metered Components and updated Product information.Composer: V1.0.326.1000 Alpha: Initial Alpha release. Should be stable, with minor issues.CoNatural Components: CoNatural Components 1.6: Code fixes: Created helper classes to generate source code for type mapper/materializer. Fixed issue in optimized type materializer when loading ...CRM External View: 1.2: New Features in v1.2 release Password protected views. No more using Web Data Access role from v1. Filtering capabilities Caching for performan...Designit Video Embed Package: Release 1.1.0 beta1: You can now either have the video embeded directly in the template or have a preview in template that opens the video in a lightbox window.FsUnit: FsUnit 0.9.0 for NUnit: This release is for F# 2.0 and NUnit 2.5+.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog 0.0.1: Laughing Dog - Alpla - v 0.0.1 First released version of the Laughing Dog framework.LiveUpload to Facebook: LiveUpload to Facebook 3.2: Version 3.2Become a fan on Facebook! Features Quickly and easily upload your photos and videos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Win...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi March 26: This version adds the Join feature for creating a new "featureset" with attributes that are joined with attributes from a Excel data label named 'D...Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor: Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor 1.2.2: This edition supports: Newer and older editions of Birdstep Technology's EasyConnect HUAWEI Mobile Partner MWConn User defined location for s...Multiplayer Quiz: Release 1_6_351_0: A beta release of the next version. Please leave any errors in discussions or comments.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Fsutil sparse file native code - c sharp wrapper: Project Description A C# code wrapping a native code-Sparse files1 The code is about SPARSE files- the abillity to create huge files (for future us...Nice Libraries: 1.30 build 50325.01: Release 1.30 build 50325.01Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend binaries v1.0: This is the first public release of the Pretty Good Frontend binariesPylor: Pylor 0.1 alpha: This is the very first published version. I hope I can put a sample project soon.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.1 refresh: There was a typo or two in the sample batch file. Corrected now.Rapidshare Episode Downloader: RED v0.8.3: 0.8.1 introduced the ability to advance to the next episode. In 0.8.2 a bug was found that if episode number is less then 10, then the preceding 0...RapidWebDev - .NET Enterprise Software Development Infrastructure: RapidWebDev 1.52: RapidWebDev is an infrastructure helps to develop enterprise software solutions in Microsoft .NET easily and productively. This is the release vers...thommo cannon: game: gamethommo cannon: setup: setupthommo cannon: test: testTinare: Tinare DLL: Tinare DLL is a dynamic-link library written in C# which provides the functions to encrypt and decrypt a byte stream with tinare.WeatherBar: WeatherBar 2.1 [No Installation]: Minor changes to release 2.0 (http://weatherbar.codeplex.com/releases/view/42490). Fixed the bug that caused an exception to be thrown if the user...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightLINQ to TwitterTable2ClassFluent Ribbon Control SuiteNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

  Read the article

• Partial Page Rendering in OAF Page

  - by PRajkumar

  Let us try to implement partial page rendering for a text item. If value of TextItem1 is null then TextItem2 will not be appreared on UI. If value of TextItem1 is not null then TextItem2 will be appreared on UI.   1. Create a New OA Workspace and Empty OA Project File> New > General> Workspace Configured for Oracle Applications File Name -- PPRProj Project Name – PPRDemoProj Default Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.pprdemo   2. Create Application Module AM PPRDemoProj right click > New > ADF Business Components > Application Module Name -- PPRAM Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.pprdemo.server   Check Application Module Class: PPRAMImpl Generate JavaFile(s)   3. Create a PPRVO View Object PPRDemoProj> New > ADF Business Components > View Objects Name – PPRVO Package – prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.pprdemo.server   In Attribute Page Click on New button and create transient primary key attribute with the following properties:   Attribute Property Name RowKey Type Number Updateable Always Key Attribute (Checked)   Click New button again and create transient attribute with the following properties:   Attribute Property Name TextItem2Render Type Boolean Updateable Always   Note – No Need to generate any JAVA files for PPRVO   4. Add Your View Object to Root UI Application Module Right click on PPRAM > Edit PPRAM > Data Model > Select PPRVO in Available View Objects list and shuttle to Data Model list   5. Create a OA components Page PPRDemoProj right click > New > OA Components > Page Name – PPRPG Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.pprdemo.webui   6. Modify the Page Layout (Top-level) Region   Attribute Property ID PageLayoutRN Region Style pageLayout Form Property True Auto Footer True Window Title PPR Demo Window Title True Title PPR Demo Page Header AM Definition prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.pprdemo.server.PPRAM   7. Create the Second Region (Main Content Region) Right click on PageLayoutRN > New > Region   Attribute Property ID MainRN Region Style messageComponentLayout   8. Create Two Text Items   Create First messageTextItem -- Right click on MainRN > New > messageTextInput   Attribute Property ID TextItem1 Region Style messageTextInput Prompt Text Item1 Length 20 Disable Server Side Validation True Disable Client Side Validation True Action Type firePartialAction Event TextItem1Change Submit True   Note -- Disable Client Side Validation and Event property appears after you set the Action Type property to firePartialAction   Create Second messageTextItem -- Select MainRN right click > New > messageTextInput   Attribute Property ID TextItem2 Region Style messageTextInput Prompt Text Item2 Length 20 Rendered ${oa.PPRVO1.TextItem2Render}   9. Add Following code in PPRAMImpl.java   import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.OARow; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.OAViewObject; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.server.OAApplicationModuleImpl; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.server.OAViewObjectImpl; public void handlePPRAction()  {   Number val = 1;  OAViewObject vo = (OAViewObject)findViewObject("PPRVO1");  if (vo != null)   {    if (vo.getFetchedRowCount() == 0)    {     vo.setMaxFetchSize(0);     vo.executeQuery();     vo.insertRow(vo.createRow());     OARow row = (OARow)vo.first();            row.setAttribute("RowKey", val);    row.setAttribute("TextItem2Render", Boolean.FALSE);      }  } }   10. Implement Controller for Page Select PageLayoutRN in Structure pane right click > Set New Controller Package Name -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.pprdemo.webui Class Name – PPRCO   Write following code in processFormRequest function of PPRCO Controller   import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.OARow; import oracle.apps.fnd.framework.OAViewObject; public void processRequest(OAPageContext pageContext, OAWebBean webBean) {  super.processRequest(pageContext, webBean);  PPRAMImpl am = (PPRAMImpl)pageContext.getApplicationModule(webBean);      am.invokeMethod("handlePPRAction"); } public void processFormRequest(OAPageContext pageContext, OAWebBean webBean) {  super.processFormRequest(pageContext, webBean);        PPRAMImpl am = (PPRAMImpl)pageContext.getApplicationModule(webBean);  OAViewObject vo = (OAViewObject)am.findViewObject("PPRVO1");  OARow row = (OARow)vo.getCurrentRow();        if ("TextItem1Change".equals(pageContext.getParameter(EVENT_PARAM)))  {   if (pageContext.getParameter("TextItem1").equals(""))   {    row.setAttribute("TextItem2Render", Boolean.FALSE);   }   else   {    row.setAttribute("TextItem2Render", Boolean.TRUE);   }  } }   11. Congratulation you have successfully finished. Run Your PPRPG page and Test Your Work          

  Read the article

• Using Table-Valued Parameters With SQL Server Reporting Services

  - by Jesse

  In my last post I talked about using table-valued parameters to pass a list of integer values to a stored procedure without resorting to using comma-delimited strings and parsing out each value into a TABLE variable. In this post I’ll extend the “Customer Transaction Summary” report example to see how we might leverage this same stored procedure from within an SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report. I’ve worked with SSRS off and on for the past several years and have generally found it to be a very useful tool for building nice-looking reports for end users quickly and easily. That said, I’ve been frustrated by SSRS from time to time when seemingly simple things are difficult to accomplish or simply not supported at all. I thought that using table-valued parameters from within a SSRS report would be simple, but unfortunately I was wrong. Customer Transaction Summary Example Let’s take the “Customer Transaction Summary” report example from the last post and try to plug that same stored procedure into an SSRS report. Our report will have three parameters: Start Date – beginning of the date range for which the report will summarize customer transactions End Date – end of the date range for which the report will summarize customer transactions Customer Ids – One or more customer Ids representing the customers that will be included in the report The simplest way to get started with this report will be to create a new dataset and point it at our Customer Transaction Summary report stored procedure (note that I’m using SSRS 2012 in the screenshots below, but there should be little to no difference with SSRS 2008): When you initially create this dataset the SSRS designer will try to invoke the stored procedure to determine what the parameters and output fields are for you automatically. As part of this process the following dialog pops-up: Obviously I can’t use this dialog to specify a value for the ‘@customerIds’ parameter since it is of the IntegerListTableType user-defined type that we created in the last post. Unfortunately this really throws the SSRS designer for a loop, and regardless of what combination of Data Type, Pass Null Value, or Parameter Value I used here, I kept getting this error dialog with the message, "Operand type clash: nvarchar is incompatible with IntegerListTableType". This error message makes some sense considering that the nvarchar type is indeed incompatible with the IntegerListTableType, but there’s little clue given as to how to remedy the situation. I don’t know for sure, but I think that behind-the-scenes the SSRS designer is trying to give the @customerIds parameter an nvarchar-typed SqlParameter which is causing the issue. When I first saw this error I figured that this might just be a limitation of the dataset designer and that I’d be able to work around the issue by manually defining the parameters. I know that there are some special steps that need to be taken when invoking a stored procedure with a table-valued parameter from ADO .NET, so I figured that I might be able to use some custom code embedded in the report  to create a SqlParameter instance with the needed properties and value to make this work, but the “Operand type clash" error message persisted. The Text Query Approach Just because we’re using a stored procedure to create the dataset for this report doesn’t mean that we can’t use the ‘Text’ Query Type option and construct an EXEC statement that will invoke the stored procedure. In order for this to work properly the EXEC statement will also need to declare and populate an IntegerListTableType variable to pass into the stored procedure. Before I go any further I want to make one point clear: this is a really ugly hack and it makes me cringe to do it. Simply put, I strongly feel that it should not be this difficult to use a table-valued parameter with SSRS. With that said, let’s take a look at what we’ll have to do to make this work. Manually Define Parameters First, we’ll need to manually define the parameters for report by right-clicking on the ‘Parameters’ folder in the ‘Report Data’ window. We’ll need to define the ‘@startDate’ and ‘@endDate’ as simple date parameters. We’ll also create a parameter called ‘@customerIds’ that will be a mutli-valued Integer parameter: In the ‘Available Values’ tab we’ll point this parameter at a simple dataset that just returns the CustomerId and CustomerName of each row in the Customers table of the database or manually define a handful of Customer Id values to make available when the report runs. Once we have these parameters properly defined we can take another crack at creating the dataset that will invoke the ‘rpt_CustomerTransactionSummary’ stored procedure. This time we’ll choose the ‘Text’ query type option and put the following into the ‘Query’ text area: 1: exec('declare @customerIdList IntegerListTableType ' + @customerIdInserts + 2: ' EXEC rpt_CustomerTransactionSummary 3: @startDate=''' + @startDate + ''', 4: @endDate='''+ @endDate + ''', 5: @customerIds=@customerIdList')   By using the ‘Text’ query type we can enter any arbitrary SQL that we we want to and then use parameters and string concatenation to inject pieces of that query at run time. It can be a bit tricky to parse this out at first glance, but from the SSRS designer’s point of view this query defines three parameters: @customerIdInserts – This will be a Text parameter that we use to define INSERT statements that will populate the @customerIdList variable that is being declared in the SQL. This parameter won’t actually ever get passed into the stored procedure. I’ll go into how this will work in a bit. @startDate – This is a simple date parameter that will get passed through directly into the @startDate parameter of the stored procedure on line 3. @endDate – This is another simple data parameter that will get passed through into the @endDate parameter of the stored procedure on line 4. At this point the dataset designer will be able to correctly parse the query and should even be able to detect the fields that the stored procedure will return without needing to specify any values for query when prompted to. Once the dataset has been correctly defined we’ll have a @customerIdInserts parameter listed in the ‘Parameters’ tab of the dataset designer. We need to define an expression for this parameter that will take the values selected by the user for the ‘@customerIds’ parameter that we defined earlier and convert them into INSERT statements that will populate the @customerIdList variable that we defined in our Text query. In order to do this we’ll need to add some custom code to our report using the ‘Report Properties’ dialog: Any custom code defined in the Report Properties dialog gets embedded into the .rdl of the report itself and (unfortunately) must be written in VB .NET. Note that you can also add references to custom .NET assemblies (which could be written in any language), but that’s outside the scope of this post so we’ll stick with the “quick and dirty” VB .NET approach for now. Here’s the VB .NET code (note that any embedded code that you add here must be defined in a static/shared function, though you can define as many functions as you want): 1: Public Shared Function BuildIntegerListInserts(ByVal variableName As String, ByVal paramValues As Object()) As String 2: Dim insertStatements As New System.Text.StringBuilder() 3: For Each paramValue As Object In paramValues 4: insertStatements.AppendLine(String.Format("INSERT {0} VALUES ({1})", variableName, paramValue)) 5: Next 6: Return insertStatements.ToString() 7: End Function   This method takes a variable name and an array of objects. We use an array of objects here because that is how SSRS will pass us the values that were selected by the user at run-time. The method uses a StringBuilder to construct INSERT statements that will insert each value from the object array into the provided variable name. Once this method has been defined in the custom code for the report we can go back into the dataset designer’s Parameters tab and update the expression for the ‘@customerIdInserts’ parameter by clicking on the button with the “function” symbol that appears to the right of the parameter value. We’ll set the expression to: 1: =Code.BuildIntegerListInserts("@customerIdList ", Parameters!customerIds.Value)   In order to invoke our custom code method we simply need to invoke “Code.<method name>” and pass in any needed parameters. The first parameter needs to match the name of the IntegerListTableType variable that we used in the EXEC statement of our query. The second parameter will come from the Value property of the ‘@customerIds’ parameter (this evaluates to an object array at run time). Finally, we’ll need to edit the properties of the ‘@customerIdInserts’ parameter on the report to mark it as a nullable internal parameter so that users aren’t prompted to provide a value for it when running the report. Limitations And Final Thoughts When I first started looking into the text query approach described above I wondered if there might be an upper limit to the size of the string that can be used to run a report. Obviously, the size of the actual query could increase pretty dramatically if you have a parameter that has a lot of potential values or you need to support several different table-valued parameters in the same query. I tested the example Customer Transaction Summary report with 1000 selected customers without any issue, but your mileage may vary depending on how much data you might need to pass into your query. If you think that the text query hack is a lot of work just to use a table-valued parameter, I agree! I think that it should be a lot easier than this to use a table-valued parameter from within SSRS, but so far I haven’t found a better way. It might be possible to create some custom .NET code that could build the EXEC statement for a given set of parameters automatically, but exploring that will have to wait for another post. For now, unless there’s a really compelling reason or requirement to use table-valued parameters from SSRS reports I would probably stick with the tried and true “join-multi-valued-parameter-to-CSV-and-split-in-the-query” approach for using mutli-valued parameters in a stored procedure.

  Read the article

• Unity – Part 5: Injecting Values

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction This is the fifth post on Unity. You can find the introductory post here, the second post, on dependency injection here, a third one on Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) here and the latest so far, on writing custom extensions, here. This time we will talk about injecting simple values. An Inversion of Control (IoC) / Dependency Injector (DI) container like Unity can be used for things other than injecting complex class dependencies. It can also be used for setting property values or method/constructor parameters whenever a class is built. The main difference is that these values do not have a lifetime manager associated with them and do not come from the regular IoC registration store. Unlike, for instance, MEF, Unity won’t let you register as a dependency a string or an integer, so you have to take a different approach, which I will describe in this post. Scenario Let’s imagine we have a base interface that describes a logger – the same as in previous examples: 1: public interface ILogger 2: { 3: void Log(String message); 4: } And a concrete implementation that writes to a file: 1: public class FileLogger : ILogger 2: { 3: public String Filename 4: { 5: get; 6: set; 7: } 8:  9: #region ILogger Members 10:  11: public void Log(String message) 12: { 13: using (Stream file = File.OpenWrite(this.Filename)) 14: { 15: Byte[] data = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(message); 16: 17: file.Write(data, 0, data.Length); 18: } 19: } 20:  21: #endregion 22: } And let’s say we want the Filename property to come from the application settings (appSettings) section on the Web/App.config file. As usual with Unity, there is an extensibility point that allows us to automatically do this, both with code configuration or statically on the configuration file. Extending Injection We start by implementing a class that will retrieve a value from the appSettings by inheriting from ValueElement: 1: sealed class AppSettingsParameterValueElement : ValueElement, IDependencyResolverPolicy 2: { 3: #region Private methods 4: private Object CreateInstance(Type parameterType) 5: { 6: Object configurationValue = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[this.AppSettingsKey]; 7:  8: if (parameterType != typeof(String)) 9: { 10: TypeConverter typeConverter = this.GetTypeConverter(parameterType); 11:  12: configurationValue = typeConverter.ConvertFromInvariantString(configurationValue as String); 13: } 14:  15: return (configurationValue); 16: } 17: #endregion 18:  19: #region Private methods 20: private TypeConverter GetTypeConverter(Type parameterType) 21: { 22: if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(this.TypeConverterTypeName) == false) 23: { 24: return (Activator.CreateInstance(TypeResolver.ResolveType(this.TypeConverterTypeName)) as TypeConverter); 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: return (TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(parameterType)); 29: } 30: } 31: #endregion 32:  33: #region Public override methods 34: public override InjectionParameterValue GetInjectionParameterValue(IUnityContainer container, Type parameterType) 35: { 36: Object value = this.CreateInstance(parameterType); 37: return (new InjectionParameter(parameterType, value)); 38: } 39: #endregion 40:  41: #region IDependencyResolverPolicy Members 42:  43: public Object Resolve(IBuilderContext context) 44: { 45: Type parameterType = null; 46:  47: if (context.CurrentOperation is ResolvingPropertyValueOperation) 48: { 49: ResolvingPropertyValueOperation op = (context.CurrentOperation as ResolvingPropertyValueOperation); 50: PropertyInfo prop = op.TypeBeingConstructed.GetProperty(op.PropertyName); 51: parameterType = prop.PropertyType; 52: } 53: else if (context.CurrentOperation is ConstructorArgumentResolveOperation) 54: { 55: ConstructorArgumentResolveOperation op = (context.CurrentOperation as ConstructorArgumentResolveOperation); 56: String args = op.ConstructorSignature.Split('(')[1].Split(')')[0]; 57: Type[] types = args.Split(',').Select(a => Type.GetType(a.Split(' ')[0])).ToArray(); 58: ConstructorInfo ctor = op.TypeBeingConstructed.GetConstructor(types); 59: parameterType = ctor.GetParameters().Where(p => p.Name == op.ParameterName).Single().ParameterType; 60: } 61: else if (context.CurrentOperation is MethodArgumentResolveOperation) 62: { 63: MethodArgumentResolveOperation op = (context.CurrentOperation as MethodArgumentResolveOperation); 64: String methodName = op.MethodSignature.Split('(')[0].Split(' ')[1]; 65: String args = op.MethodSignature.Split('(')[1].Split(')')[0]; 66: Type[] types = args.Split(',').Select(a => Type.GetType(a.Split(' ')[0])).ToArray(); 67: MethodInfo method = op.TypeBeingConstructed.GetMethod(methodName, types); 68: parameterType = method.GetParameters().Where(p => p.Name == op.ParameterName).Single().ParameterType; 69: } 70:  71: return (this.CreateInstance(parameterType)); 72: } 73:  74: #endregion 75:  76: #region Public properties 77: [ConfigurationProperty("appSettingsKey", IsRequired = true)] 78: public String AppSettingsKey 79: { 80: get 81: { 82: return ((String)base["appSettingsKey"]); 83: } 84:  85: set 86: { 87: base["appSettingsKey"] = value; 88: } 89: } 90: #endregion 91: } As you can see from the implementation of the IDependencyResolverPolicy.Resolve method, this will work in three different scenarios: When it is applied to a property; When it is applied to a constructor parameter; When it is applied to an initialization method. The implementation will even try to convert the value to its declared destination, for example, if the destination property is an Int32, it will try to convert the appSettings stored string to an Int32. Injection By Configuration If we want to configure injection by configuration, we need to implement a custom section extension by inheriting from SectionExtension, and registering our custom element with the name “appSettings”: 1: sealed class AppSettingsParameterInjectionElementExtension : SectionExtension 2: { 3: public override void AddExtensions(SectionExtensionContext context) 4: { 5: context.AddElement<AppSettingsParameterValueElement>("appSettings"); 6: } 7: } And on the configuration file, for setting a property, we use it like this: 1: <appSettings> 2: <add key="LoggerFilename" value="Log.txt"/> 3: </appSettings> 4: <unity xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/practices/2010/unity"> 5: <container> 6: <register type="MyNamespace.ILogger, MyAssembly" mapTo="MyNamespace.ConsoleLogger, MyAssembly"/> 7: <register type="MyNamespace.ILogger, MyAssembly" mapTo="MyNamespace.FileLogger, MyAssembly" name="File"> 8: <lifetime type="singleton"/> 9: <property name="Filename"> 10: <appSettings appSettingsKey="LoggerFilename"/> 11: </property> 12: </register> 13: </container> 14: </unity> If we would like to inject the value as a constructor parameter, it would be instead: 1: <unity xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/practices/2010/unity"> 2: <sectionExtension type="MyNamespace.AppSettingsParameterInjectionElementExtension, MyAssembly" /> 3: <container> 4: <register type="MyNamespace.ILogger, MyAssembly" mapTo="MyNamespace.ConsoleLogger, MyAssembly"/> 5: <register type="MyNamespace.ILogger, MyAssembly" mapTo="MyNamespace.FileLogger, MyAssembly" name="File"> 6: <lifetime type="singleton"/> 7: <constructor> 8: <param name="filename" type="System.String"> 9: <appSettings appSettingsKey="LoggerFilename"/> 10: </param> 11: </constructor> 12: </register> 13: </container> 14: </unity> Notice the appSettings section, where we add a LoggerFilename entry, which is the same as the one referred by our AppSettingsParameterInjectionElementExtension extension. For more advanced behavior, you can add a TypeConverterName attribute to the appSettings declaration, where you can pass an assembly qualified name of a class that inherits from TypeConverter. This class will be responsible for converting the appSettings value to a destination type. Injection By Attribute If we would like to use attributes instead, we need to create a custom attribute by inheriting from DependencyResolutionAttribute: 1: [Serializable] 2: [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Parameter | AttributeTargets.Property, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)] 3: public sealed class AppSettingsDependencyResolutionAttribute : DependencyResolutionAttribute 4: { 5: public AppSettingsDependencyResolutionAttribute(String appSettingsKey) 6: { 7: this.AppSettingsKey = appSettingsKey; 8: } 9:  10: public String TypeConverterTypeName 11: { 12: get; 13: set; 14: } 15:  16: public String AppSettingsKey 17: { 18: get; 19: private set; 20: } 21:  22: public override IDependencyResolverPolicy CreateResolver(Type typeToResolve) 23: { 24: return (new AppSettingsParameterValueElement() { AppSettingsKey = this.AppSettingsKey, TypeConverterTypeName = this.TypeConverterTypeName }); 25: } 26: } As for file configuration, there is a mandatory property for setting the appSettings key and an optional TypeConverterName  for setting the name of a TypeConverter. Both the custom attribute and the custom section return an instance of the injector AppSettingsParameterValueElement that we implemented in the first place. Now, the attribute needs to be placed before the injected class’ Filename property: 1: public class FileLogger : ILogger 2: { 3: [AppSettingsDependencyResolution("LoggerFilename")] 4: public String Filename 5: { 6: get; 7: set; 8: } 9:  10: #region ILogger Members 11:  12: public void Log(String message) 13: { 14: using (Stream file = File.OpenWrite(this.Filename)) 15: { 16: Byte[] data = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(message); 17: 18: file.Write(data, 0, data.Length); 19: } 20: } 21:  22: #endregion 23: } Or, if we wanted to use constructor injection: 1: public class FileLogger : ILogger 2: { 3: public String Filename 4: { 5: get; 6: set; 7: } 8:  9: public FileLogger([AppSettingsDependencyResolution("LoggerFilename")] String filename) 10: { 11: this.Filename = filename; 12: } 13:  14: #region ILogger Members 15:  16: public void Log(String message) 17: { 18: using (Stream file = File.OpenWrite(this.Filename)) 19: { 20: Byte[] data = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(message); 21: 22: file.Write(data, 0, data.Length); 23: } 24: } 25:  26: #endregion 27: } Usage Just do: 1: ILogger logger = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<ILogger>("File"); And off you go! A simple way do avoid hardcoded values in component registrations. Of course, this same concept can be applied to registry keys, environment values, XML attributes, etc, etc, just change the implementation of the AppSettingsParameterValueElement class. Next stop: custom lifetime managers.

  Read the article

• Windows Server 2008 Task Scheduler Tasks Not Executing

  - by omatase

  I've been having an intermittent problem for some time now with the Windows Task Scheduler that I can't work out. I use the task scheduler to run a C# app I've written that has various plugins used to ensure production systems are working. This task scheduler itself is actually a production system so I have one simple task that executes every 8 minutes to notify an external monitoring system that the task scheduler is still up. If this external service fails to receive an "all-clear" at least once every 15 minutes (or so I don't remember the exact number right now) it will message us that the monitoring system is down. In the past we've had intermittent "down" messages from time to time and each time I've investigated the cause I was unable to find any problems. So this time I wanted to ask the StackOverflow community since it doesn't look like I'll have luck on my own. This morning at 2:32 AM the task fired (exactly 8 minutes after the previous firing) however the task didn't fire again until 3:28. There are no errors that I can see in the Event Viewer at this time. When I look at the Task Scheduler log there are no errors there either. Here is what the log looks like though: Information 6/11/2011 3:28:56 AM 102 Task completed (2) d6cf2412-269e-48bf-9f40-4a863347baad Information 6/11/2011 3:28:56 AM 201 Action completed (2) d6cf2412-269e-48bf-9f40-4a863347baad Information 6/11/2011 3:28:55 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 3:28:55 AM 200 Action started (1) d6cf2412-269e-48bf-9f40-4a863347baad Information 6/11/2011 3:28:55 AM 100 Task Started (1) d6cf2412-269e-48bf-9f40-4a863347baad Information 6/11/2011 3:28:55 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) Information 6/11/2011 3:28:55 AM 107 Task triggered on scheduler Info d6cf2412-269e-48bf-9f40-4a863347baad Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 102 Task completed (2) b91fe5ce-39ef-42fb-adbe-bd8be012c00a Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 201 Action completed (2) b91fe5ce-39ef-42fb-adbe-bd8be012c00a Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 102 Task completed (2) 556c07dc-2724-4a21-a97e-dc4abd56f94d Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 201 Action completed (2) 556c07dc-2724-4a21-a97e-dc4abd56f94d Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 102 Task completed (2) 79328289-f742-49dd-aa0d-c3d05db50895 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 201 Action completed (2) 79328289-f742-49dd-aa0d-c3d05db50895 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 102 Task completed (2) 19743755-47b6-4b98-9bec-052193be9496 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 201 Action completed (2) 19743755-47b6-4b98-9bec-052193be9496 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 102 Task completed (2) c165754f-e3e6-4176-a327-11f9c06c39a5 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 201 Action completed (2) c165754f-e3e6-4176-a327-11f9c06c39a5 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 102 Task completed (2) 0e62ad3e-1f6e-40c0-9155-19f0108dee22 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:15 AM 201 Action completed (2) 0e62ad3e-1f6e-40c0-9155-19f0108dee22 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 200 Action started (1) 0e62ad3e-1f6e-40c0-9155-19f0108dee22 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 200 Action started (1) c165754f-e3e6-4176-a327-11f9c06c39a5 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 200 Action started (1) 19743755-47b6-4b98-9bec-052193be9496 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 200 Action started (1) 79328289-f742-49dd-aa0d-c3d05db50895 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 200 Action started (1) 556c07dc-2724-4a21-a97e-dc4abd56f94d Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 200 Action started (1) b91fe5ce-39ef-42fb-adbe-bd8be012c00a Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 100 Task Started (1) 0e62ad3e-1f6e-40c0-9155-19f0108dee22 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 100 Task Started (1) c165754f-e3e6-4176-a327-11f9c06c39a5 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 100 Task Started (1) 19743755-47b6-4b98-9bec-052193be9496 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 100 Task Started (1) 79328289-f742-49dd-aa0d-c3d05db50895 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 100 Task Started (1) 556c07dc-2724-4a21-a97e-dc4abd56f94d Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 100 Task Started (1) b91fe5ce-39ef-42fb-adbe-bd8be012c00a Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 107 Task triggered on scheduler Info 0e62ad3e-1f6e-40c0-9155-19f0108dee22 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 107 Task triggered on scheduler Info c165754f-e3e6-4176-a327-11f9c06c39a5 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 107 Task triggered on scheduler Info 19743755-47b6-4b98-9bec-052193be9496 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 107 Task triggered on scheduler Info 79328289-f742-49dd-aa0d-c3d05db50895 Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 107 Task triggered on scheduler Info 556c07dc-2724-4a21-a97e-dc4abd56f94d Information 6/11/2011 3:28:10 AM 107 Task triggered on scheduler Info b91fe5ce-39ef-42fb-adbe-bd8be012c00a Information 6/11/2011 2:32:56 AM 102 Task completed (2) 16e4f2c3-a340-410a-9c14-4bfe0861fdd5 Information 6/11/2011 2:32:56 AM 201 Action completed (2) 16e4f2c3-a340-410a-9c14-4bfe0861fdd5 Information 6/11/2011 2:32:55 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 2:32:55 AM 200 Action started (1) 16e4f2c3-a340-410a-9c14-4bfe0861fdd5 Information 6/11/2011 2:32:55 AM 100 Task Started (1) 16e4f2c3-a340-410a-9c14-4bfe0861fdd5 Information 6/11/2011 2:32:55 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) Information 6/11/2011 2:32:55 AM 107 Task triggered on scheduler Info 16e4f2c3-a340-410a-9c14-4bfe0861fdd5 Seems kind of strange. I also have two other C# apps that run and check something each hour on the hour using task scheduler. If I look at the history for those I can see that they didn't execute at 3 AM either! They all waited until 3:28 to start as well. If I look at "tasks completed" in the Event Viewer it shows that only one task was able to run between the 2:32 AM to 3:28 AM time period. The task was "\Microsoft\Windows\RAC\RACAgent" And here's what it looked like: Information 6/11/2011 3:18:09 AM 102 Task completed (2) 00c53a85-ba20-4666-80db-fbbe2492c0ad Information 6/11/2011 3:18:09 AM 201 Action completed (2) 00c53a85-ba20-4666-80db-fbbe2492c0ad Information 6/11/2011 3:18:08 AM 129 Created Task Process Info Information 6/11/2011 3:18:08 AM 200 Action started (1) 00c53a85-ba20-4666-80db-fbbe2492c0ad Information 6/11/2011 3:18:08 AM 100 Task Started (1) 00c53a85-ba20-4666-80db-fbbe2492c0ad Information 6/11/2011 3:18:08 AM 319 Task Engine received message to start task (1) I appreciate any ideas anyone may have.

  Read the article

• Optimizing Solaris 11 SHA-1 on Intel Processors

  - by danx

  SHA-1 is a "hash" or "digest" operation that produces a 160 bit (20 byte) checksum value on arbitrary data, such as a file. It is intended to uniquely identify text and to verify it hasn't been modified. Max Locktyukhin and others at Intel have improved the performance of the SHA-1 digest algorithm using multiple techniques. This code has been incorporated into Solaris 11 and is available in the Solaris Crypto Framework via the libmd(3LIB), the industry-standard libpkcs11(3LIB) library, and Solaris kernel module sha1. The optimized code is used automatically on systems with a x86 CPU supporting SSSE3 (Intel Supplemental SSSE3). Intel microprocessor architectures that support SSSE3 include Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge microprocessor families. Further optimizations are available for microprocessors that support AVX (such as Sandy Bridge). Although SHA-1 is considered obsolete because of weaknesses found in the SHA-1 algorithm—NIST recommends using at least SHA-256, SHA-1 is still widely used and will be with us for awhile more. Collisions (the same SHA-1 result for two different inputs) can be found with moderate effort. SHA-1 is used heavily though in SSL/TLS, for example. And SHA-1 is stronger than the older MD5 digest algorithm, another digest option defined in SSL/TLS. Optimizations Review SHA-1 operates by reading an arbitrary amount of data. The data is read in 512 bit (64 byte) blocks (the last block is padded in a specific way to ensure it's a full 64 bytes). Each 64 byte block has 80 "rounds" of calculations (consisting of a mixture of "ROTATE-LEFT", "AND", and "XOR") applied to the block. Each round produces a 32-bit intermediate result, called W[i]. Here's what each round operates: The first 16 rounds, rounds 0 to 15, read the 512 bit block 32 bits at-a-time. These 32 bits is used as input to the round. The remaining rounds, rounds 16 to 79, use the results from the previous rounds as input. Specifically for round i it XORs the results of rounds i-3, i-8, i-14, and i-16 and rotates the result left 1 bit. The remaining calculations for the round is a series of AND, XOR, and ROTATE-LEFT operators on the 32-bit input and some constants. The 32-bit result is saved as W[i] for round i. The 32-bit result of the final round, W[79], is the SHA-1 checksum. Optimization: Vectorization The first 16 rounds can be vectorized (computed in parallel) because they don't depend on the output of a previous round. As for the remaining rounds, because of step 2 above, computing round i depends on the results of round i-3, W[i-3], one can vectorize 3 rounds at-a-time. Max Locktyukhin found through simple factoring, explained in detail in his article referenced below, that the dependencies of round i on the results of rounds i-3, i-8, i-14, and i-16 can be replaced instead with dependencies on the results of rounds i-6, i-16, i-28, and i-32. That is, instead of initializing intermediate result W[i] with: W[i] = (W[i-3] XOR W[i-8] XOR W[i-14] XOR W[i-16]) ROTATE-LEFT 1 Initialize W[i] as follows: W[i] = (W[i-6] XOR W[i-16] XOR W[i-28] XOR W[i-32]) ROTATE-LEFT 2 That means that 6 rounds could be vectorized at once, with no additional calculations, instead of just 3! This optimization is independent of Intel or any other microprocessor architecture, although the microprocessor has to support vectorization to use it, and exploits one of the weaknesses of SHA-1. Optimization: SSSE3 Intel SSSE3 makes use of 16 %xmm registers, each 128 bits wide. The 4 32-bit inputs to a round, W[i-6], W[i-16], W[i-28], W[i-32], all fit in one %xmm register. The following code snippet, from Max Locktyukhin's article, converted to ATT assembly syntax, computes 4 rounds in parallel with just a dozen or so SSSE3 instructions: movdqa W_minus_04, W_TMP pxor W_minus_28, W // W equals W[i-32:i-29] before XOR // W = W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] palignr $8, W_minus_08, W_TMP // W_TMP = W[i-6:i-3], combined from // W[i-4:i-1] and W[i-8:i-5] vectors pxor W_minus_16, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25]) ^ W[i-16:i-13] pxor W_TMP, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) movdqa W, W_TMP // 4 dwords in W are rotated left by 2 psrld $30, W // rotate left by 2 W = (W >> 30) | (W << 2) pslld $2, W_TMP por W, W_TMP movdqa W_TMP, W // four new W values W[i:i+3] are now calculated paddd (K_XMM), W_TMP // adding 4 current round's values of K movdqa W_TMP, (WK(i)) // storing for downstream GPR instructions to read A window of the 32 previous results, W[i-1] to W[i-32] is saved in memory on the stack. This is best illustrated with a chart. Without vectorization, computing the rounds is like this (each "R" represents 1 round of SHA-1 computation): RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR With vectorization, 4 rounds can be computed in parallel: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR Optimization: AVX The new "Sandy Bridge" microprocessor architecture, which supports AVX, allows another interesting optimization. SSSE3 instructions have two operands, a input and an output. AVX allows three operands, two inputs and an output. In many cases two SSSE3 instructions can be combined into one AVX instruction. The difference is best illustrated with an example. Consider these two instructions from the snippet above: pxor W_minus_16, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25]) ^ W[i-16:i-13] pxor W_TMP, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) With AVX they can be combined in one instruction: vpxor W_minus_16, W, W_TMP // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) This optimization is also in Solaris, although Sandy Bridge-based systems aren't widely available yet. As an exercise for the reader, AVX also has 256-bit media registers, %ymm0 - %ymm15 (a superset of 128-bit %xmm0 - %xmm15). Can %ymm registers be used to parallelize the code even more? Optimization: Solaris-specific In addition to using the Intel code described above, I performed other minor optimizations to the Solaris SHA-1 code: Increased the digest(1) and mac(1) command's buffer size from 4K to 64K, as previously done for decrypt(1) and encrypt(1). This size is well suited for ZFS file systems, but helps for other file systems as well. Optimized encode functions, which byte swap the input and output data, to copy/byte-swap 4 or 8 bytes at-a-time instead of 1 byte-at-a-time. Enhanced the Solaris mdb(1) and kmdb(1) debuggers to display all 16 %xmm and %ymm registers (mdb "$x" command). Previously they only displayed the first 8 that are available in 32-bit mode. Can't optimize if you can't debug :-). Changed the SHA-1 code to allow processing in "chunks" greater than 2 Gigabytes (64-bits) Performance I measured performance on a Sun Ultra 27 (which has a Nehalem-class Xeon 5500 Intel W3570 microprocessor @3.2GHz). Turbo mode is disabled for consistent performance measurement. Graphs are better than words and numbers, so here they are: The first graph shows the Solaris digest(1) command before and after the optimizations discussed here, contained in libmd(3LIB). I ran the digest command on a half GByte file in swapfs (/tmp) and execution time decreased from 1.35 seconds to 0.98 seconds. The second graph shows the the results of an internal microbenchmark that uses the Solaris libpkcs11(3LIB) library. The operations are on a 128 byte buffer with 10,000 iterations. The results show operations increased from 320,000 to 416,000 operations per second. Finally the third graph shows the results of an internal kernel microbenchmark that uses the Solaris /kernel/crypto/amd64/sha1 module. The operations are on a 64Kbyte buffer with 100 iterations. third graph shows the results of an internal kernel microbenchmark that uses the Solaris /kernel/crypto/amd64/sha1 module. The operations are on a 64Kbyte buffer with 100 iterations. The results show for 1 kernel thread, operations increased from 410 to 600 MBytes/second. For 8 kernel threads, operations increase from 1540 to 1940 MBytes/second. Availability This code is in Solaris 11 FCS. It is available in the 64-bit libmd(3LIB) library for 64-bit programs and is in the Solaris kernel. You must be running hardware that supports Intel's SSSE3 instructions (for example, Intel Nehalem, Westmere, or Sandy Bridge microprocessor architectures). The easiest way to determine if SSSE3 is available is with the isainfo(1) command. For example, nehalem $ isainfo -v $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu If the output also shows "avx", the Solaris executes the even-more optimized 3-operand AVX instructions for SHA-1 mentioned above: sandybridge $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications avx xsave pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications avx xsave pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu No special configuration or setup is needed to take advantage of this code. Solaris libraries and kernel automatically determine if it's running on SSSE3 or AVX-capable machines and execute the correctly-tuned code for that microprocessor. Summary The Solaris 11 Crypto Framework, via the sha1 kernel module and libmd(3LIB) and libpkcs11(3LIB) libraries, incorporated a useful SHA-1 optimization from Intel for SSSE3-capable microprocessors. As with other Solaris optimizations, they come automatically "under the hood" with the current Solaris release. References "Improving the Performance of the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1)" by Max Locktyukhin (Intel, March 2010). The source for these SHA-1 optimizations used in Solaris "SHA-1", Wikipedia Good overview of SHA-1 FIPS 180-1 SHA-1 standard (FIPS, 1995) NIST Comments on Cryptanalytic Attacks on SHA-1 (2005, revised 2006)

  Read the article

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager

  - by Anand Akela

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Contributed by Sunil Kunisetty and Daniel Chan Introduction and ArchitectureAs more and more enterprises deploy some of their non-critical workload on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s becoming critical to monitor those public AWS resources along side with their on-premise resources. Oracle recently announced Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in for Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to achieve that goal. The on-premise Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM12c) acts as a single tool to get a comprehensive view of your public AWS resources as well as your private cloud resources.  By deploying the plug-in within your Cloud Control environment, you gain the following management features: Monitor EBS, EC2 and RDS instances on Amazon Web Services Gather performance metrics and configuration details for AWS instances Raise alerts and violations based on thresholds set on monitoring Generate reports based on the gathered data Users of this Plug-in can leverage the rich Enterprise Manager features such as system promotion, incident generation based on thresholds, integration with 3rd party ticketing applications etc. AWS Monitoring via this Plug-in is enabled via Amazon CloudWatch API and the users of this Plug-in are responsible for supplying credentials for accessing AWS and the CloudWatch API. This Plug-in can only be deployed on an EM12C R2 platform and agent version should be at minimum 12c R2.Here is a pictorial view of the overall architecture: Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Here are a few key features: Rich and exhaustive list of metrics. Metrics can be gathered from an Agent running outside AWS. Critical configuration information. Custom Home Pages with charts and AWS configuration information. Generate incidents based on thresholds set on monitoring data. Discovery and Monitoring AWS instances can be added to EM12C either via the EM12c User Interface (UI) or the EM12c Command Line Interface ( EMCLI)  by providing the AWS credentials (Secret Key and Access Key Id) as well as resource specific properties as target properties. Here is a quick mapping of target types and properties for each AWS resources AWS Resource Type Target Type Resource specific properties EBS Resource Amazon EBS Service CloudWatch base URI, EC2 Base URI, Period, Volume Id, Proxy Server and Port EC2 Resource Amazon EC2 Service CloudWatch base URI, EC2 Base URI, Period, Instance  Id, Proxy Server and Port RDS Resource Amazon RDS Service CloudWatch base URI, RDS Base URI, Period, Instance  Id, Proxy Server and Port Proxy server and port are optional and are only needed if the agent is within the firewall. Here is an emcli example to add an EC2 target. Please read the Installation and Readme guide for more details and step-by-step instructions to deploy  the plugin and adding the AWS the instances. ./emcli add_target \       -name="<target name>" \       -type="AmazonEC2Service" \       -host="<host>" \       -properties="ProxyHost=<proxy server>;ProxyPort=<proxy port>;EC2_BaseURI=http://ec2.<region>.amazonaws.com;BaseURI=http://monitoring.<region>.amazonaws.com;InstanceId=<EC2 instance Id>;Period=<data point periond>"  \     -subseparator=properties="=" ./emcli set_monitoring_credential \                 -set_name="AWSKeyCredentialSet"  \                 -target_name="<target name>"  \                 -target_type="AmazonEC2Service" \                 -cred_type="AWSKeyCredential"  \                 -attributes="AccessKeyId:<access key id>;SecretKey:<secret key>" Emcli utility is found under the ORACLE_HOME of EM12C install. Once the instance is discovered, the target will show up under the ‘All Targets’ list under “Amazon EC2 Service’. Once the instances are added, one can navigate to the custom homepages for these resource types. The custom home pages not only include critical metrics, but also vital configuration parameters and incidents raised for these instances.  By mapping the configuration parameters as instance properties, we can slice-and-dice and group various AWS instance by leveraging the EM12C Config search feature. The following configuration properties and metrics are collected for these Resource types. Resource Type Configuration Properties Metrics EBS Resource Volume Id, Volume Type, Device Name, Size, Availability Zone Response: Status Utilization: QueueLength, IdleTime Volume Statistics: ReadBrandwith, WriteBandwidth, ReadThroughput, WriteThroughput Operation Statistics: ReadSize, WriteSize, ReadLatency, WriteLatency EC2 Resource Instance ID, Owner Id, Root Device type, Instance Type. Availability Zone Response: Status CPU Utilization: CPU Utilization Disk I/O:  DiskReadBytes, DiskWriteBytes, DiskReadOps, DiskWriteOps, DiskReadRate, DiskWriteRate, DiskIOThroughput, DiskReadOpsRate, DiskWriteOpsRate, DiskOperationThroughput Network I/O : NetworkIn, NetworkOut, NetworkInRate, NetworkOutRate, NetworkThroughput RDS Resource Instance ID, Database Engine Name, Database Engine Version, Database Instance Class, Allocated Storage Size, Availability Zone Response: Status Disk I/O:  ReadIOPS, WriteIOPS, ReadLatency, WriteLatency, ReadThroughput, WriteThroughput DB Utilization:  BinLogDiskUsage, CPUUtilization, DatabaseConnections, FreeableMemory, ReplicaLag, SwapUsage Custom Home Pages As mentioned above, we have custom home pages for these target types that include basic configuration information,  last 24 hours availability, top metrics and the incidents generated. Here are few snapshots. EBS Instance Home Page: EC2 Instance Home Page: RDS Instance Home Page: Further Reading: 1)      AWS Plugin download 2)      Installation and  Read Me. 3)      Screenwatch on SlideShare 4)      Extensibility Programmer's Guide 5)      Amazon Web Services

  Read the article

• DocumentDB - Another Azure NoSQL Storage Service

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2014/08/25/documentdb---another-azure-nosql-storage-service.aspxMicrosoft just released a bunch of new features for Azure on 22nd and one of them I was interested in most is DocumentDB, a document NoSQL database service on the cloud.   Quick Look at DocumentDB We can try DocumentDB from the new azure preview portal. Just click the NEW button and select the item named DocumentDB to create a new account. Specify the name of the DocumentDB, which will be the endpoint we are going to use to connect later. Select the capacity unit, resource group and subscription. In resource group section we can select which region our DocumentDB will be located. Same as other azure services select the same location with your consumers of the DocumentDB, for example the website, web services, etc.. After several minutes the DocumentDB will be ready. Click the KEYS button we can find the URI and primary key, which will be used when connecting. Now let's open Visual Studio and try to use the DocumentDB we had just created. Create a new console application and install the DocumentDB .NET client library from NuGet with the keyword "DocumentDB". You need to select "Include Prerelase" in NuGet Package Manager window since this library was not yet released. Next we will create a new database and document collection under our DocumentDB account. The code below created an instance of DocumentClient with the URI and primary key we just copied from azure portal, and create a database and collection. And it also prints the document and collection link string which will be used later to insert and query documents. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5:  6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7: Run(client).Wait(); 8:  9: Console.WriteLine("done"); 10: Console.ReadKey(); 11: } 12:  13: static async Task Run(DocumentClient client) 14: { 15:  16: var database = new Database() { Id = "testdb" }; 17: database = await client.CreateDatabaseAsync(database); 18: Console.WriteLine("database link = {0}", database.SelfLink); 19:  20: var collection = new DocumentCollection() { Id = "testcol" }; 21: collection = await client.CreateDocumentCollectionAsync(database.SelfLink, collection); 22: Console.WriteLine("collection link = {0}", collection.SelfLink); 23: } Below is the result from the console window. We need to copy the collection link string for future usage. Now if we back to the portal we will find a database was listed with the name we specified in the code. Next we will insert a document into the database and collection we had just created. In the code below we pasted the collection link which copied in previous step, create a dynamic object with several properties defined. As you can see we can add some normal properties contains string, integer, we can also add complex property for example an array, a dictionary and an object reference, unless they can be serialized to JSON. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5:  6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7:  8: // collection link pasted from the result in previous demo 9: var collectionLink = "dbs/AAk3AA==/colls/AAk3AP6oFgA=/"; 10:  11: // document we are going to insert to database 12: dynamic doc = new ExpandoObject(); 13: doc.firstName = "Shaun"; 14: doc.lastName = "Xu"; 15: doc.roles = new string[] { "developer", "trainer", "presenter", "father" }; 16:  17: // insert the docuemnt 18: InsertADoc(client, collectionLink, doc).Wait(); 19:  20: Console.WriteLine("done"); 21: Console.ReadKey(); 22: } the insert code will be very simple as below, just provide the collection link and the object we are going to insert. 1: static async Task InsertADoc(DocumentClient client, string collectionLink, dynamic doc) 2: { 3: var document = await client.CreateDocumentAsync(collectionLink, doc); 4: Console.WriteLine(await JsonConvert.SerializeObjectAsync(document, Formatting.Indented)); 5: } Below is the result after the object had been inserted. Finally we will query the document from the database and collection. Similar to the insert code, we just need to specify the collection link so that the .NET SDK will help us to retrieve all documents in it. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5:  6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7:  8: var collectionLink = "dbs/AAk3AA==/colls/AAk3AP6oFgA=/"; 9:  10: SelectDocs(client, collectionLink); 11:  12: Console.WriteLine("done"); 13: Console.ReadKey(); 14: } 15:  16: static void SelectDocs(DocumentClient client, string collectionLink) 17: { 18: var docs = client.CreateDocumentQuery(collectionLink + "docs/").ToList(); 19: foreach(var doc in docs) 20: { 21: Console.WriteLine(doc); 22: } 23: } Since there's only one document in my collection below is the result when I executed the code. As you can see all properties, includes the array was retrieve at the same time. DocumentDB also attached some properties we didn't specified such as "_rid", "_ts", "_self" etc., which is controlled by the service.   DocumentDB Benefit DocumentDB is a document NoSQL database service. Different from the traditional database, document database is truly schema-free. In a short nut, you can save anything in the same database and collection if it could be serialized to JSON. We you query the document database, all sub documents will be retrieved at the same time. This means you don't need to join other tables when using a traditional database. Document database is very useful when we build some high performance system with hierarchical data structure. For example, assuming we need to build a blog system, there will be many blog posts and each of them contains the content and comments. The comment can be commented as well. If we were using traditional database, let's say SQL Server, the database schema might be defined as below. When we need to display a post we need to load the post content from the Posts table, as well as the comments from the Comments table. We also need to build the comment tree based on the CommentID field. But if were using DocumentDB, what we need to do is to save the post as a document with a list contains all comments. Under a comment all sub comments will be a list in it. When we display this post we just need to to query the post document, the content and all comments will be loaded in proper structure. 1: { 2: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 3: "title": "xxxxx", 4: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 5: "postedOn": "08/25/2014 13:55", 6: "comments": 7: [ 8: { 9: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 10: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 11: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:00", 12: "commentedBy": "xxx" 13: }, 14: { 15: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 16: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 17: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:10", 18: "commentedBy": "xxx", 19: "comments": 20: [ 21: { 22: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 23: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 24: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:18", 25: "commentedBy": "xxx", 26: "comments": 27: [ 28: { 29: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 30: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 31: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 18:22", 32: "commentedBy": "xxx", 33: } 34: ] 35: }, 36: { 37: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 38: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 39: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 15:02", 40: "commentedBy": "xxx", 41: } 42: ] 43: }, 44: { 45: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 46: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 47: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:30", 48: "commentedBy": "xxx" 49: } 50: ] 51: }   DocumentDB vs. Table Storage DocumentDB and Table Storage are all NoSQL service in Microsoft Azure. One common question is "when we should use DocumentDB rather than Table Storage". Here are some ideas from me and some MVPs. First of all, they are different kind of NoSQL database. DocumentDB is a document database while table storage is a key-value database. Second, table storage is cheaper. DocumentDB supports scale out from one capacity unit to 5 in preview period and each capacity unit provides 10GB local SSD storage. The price is $0.73/day includes 50% discount. For storage service the highest price is $0.061/GB, which is almost 10% of DocumentDB. Third, table storage provides local-replication, geo-replication, read access geo-replication while DocumentDB doesn't support. Fourth, there is local emulator for table storage but none for DocumentDB. We have to connect to the DocumentDB on cloud when developing locally. But, DocumentDB supports some cool features that table storage doesn't have. It supports store procedure, trigger and user-defined-function. It supports rich indexing while table storage only supports indexing against partition key and row key. It supports transaction, table storage supports as well but restricted with Entity Group Transaction scope. And the last, table storage is GA but DocumentDB is still in preview.   Summary In this post I have a quick demonstration and introduction about the new DocumentDB service in Azure. It's very easy to interact through .NET and it also support REST API, Node.js SDK and Python SDK. Then I explained the concept and benefit of  using document database, then compared with table storage.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 16, 2010New ProjectsAtomFeedBuilder: Simple and lightweight Atom feed builder. Developed in VB.Net.Cable and Wire harness tester: If you build lots of cable/wire harness' you know that testing them is a pain. I have wanted an automated cable tester for a while now but commerci...Carmenta Engine Power Pack: The target of Carmenta Engine Power Pack is to provide extensions, utilities and wrapper classes that allows developers to work more efficiently w...Customer Book: Customer Book, its like address book with facility for generating quotation for a business or a supplier to the clients.Dialector: Using this program, you can convert pure Turkish texts into different dialects; such as: Emmi, Kufurbaz, Kusdili, Laz, Peltek, Tiki, and many more....Downline Commision Generator: Analyze the compensations plan of the organizations in multi-level marketing or network marketing. Check with this tool the commision plan of the c...EmbeddedSpark 2010 Project M: Project M is a system for seamlessly interfacing a tabletop interface to portable devices placed upon it. Using image recognition and projectors, P...Event Log Creator by eVestment Alliance: Provides a simple utility to create a new source and log in the Windows event log. The utility checks if the current user is an administrator, and...ExchangeHog: Desktop/daemon application that aggregates emails from multiple pop3-accounts into single Microsoft Exchange 2010 account. For users receiving ema...Extra Time Calculator: Extra Time Calculator allows exam end times to be easily calculated for students receiving an extra time accommodation.Generic WCF Hosting Service: The Generic Host Service provides a simple, reusable, and reliable mechanism for hosting WCF services. Google Storage for .NET: Google Storage for .NET (GSN) is an open source library that provides .NET developers with easy access to the Google Storage API. The library allo...Helium: The Helium XNA game engine is a light portable game engine designed to work on many platforms and soon to be expanded on more. Currently the helium...IconizedButton Control Set: ASP.NET WebForms IconizedButton Custom Control Set. Replaces the dull Button/LinkButton/HyperLink controls with styling and left and right aligned...Jedi Council PM List: Allows for users to process Private Message Lists on the Jedi Council forums for TheForce.Net.JetPumpDesign: 本软件为蒸气喷射泵设计计算软件 作者：申阳 单位：西安交通大学过程装备与控制工程61班log4Nez: An high personalized implementation of a logging libraryMutantFramework: Provides a common set of building blocks for building enterprise applicationsNUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications: NUnit add-in which allows to send notifications to Growl when test run is started or finished, when a first test failure occurs and so on.Object Reports: Object Reports is a "proof of concept" application which provides users the ability to visualy build queries based on data stored in the relational...openTrionyx: openTrionyx is a set of tools to make easier web application development. Includes Data, Web and plain text documents tools. Developed in C#, compl...Partial Rendering control for MVC 2: This project shows a web custom control that allow to have partial rendering using async post-back (through JQuery) in a MVC 2 web application.PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: The PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension exposes PowerGUI as an editor in Visual Studio. PowerShell developers can now write scripts directly in Visual...PowerShell Script Provider: Write your own PowerShell provider using only script, no C# required. Module definition is provided by a Windows PowerShell 2.0 Module, which may b...Scholar: Scholar is a solution/framework for .Net developers to help with the creation of distributed data processing (think SETI@home style apps). It is in...scrabb: Scrabb help people play scrabble over net.SharePointNuke: A DotNetNuke module that connects to a SharePoint server using web services API and displays the content of a specified list. SolidWorksBackConverter: a Project to Convert a solidwork file to an older version Soma - Sql Oriented MApping framework: Sql Oriented MApping framework.SPCreate: SPCreate auto store procedure creator. It's developed in c#. SpCreate as output ADO.NET Class (C# or VB.Net) and SQL Server or MS Access Store pro...std::streambuf wrapper for COM IStream: This provides a subclass of std::streambuf that wraps a COM IStream, so you can use an IStream with any C++ code that uses iostreams or the STL alg...VACID solutions: Solutions of verification problems posed in paper "Verification of Ample Correctness of Invariants of Data-structures". Developed with various tool...Viewer: Our Goal is to create a C# project that will centeralize Image and Movie Viewing in a forms application, It will also have a Specialized Webbrowser...vsXPathTester: vsXPathTester is a utility for Developer. This help them load XML file and the run their XPath Query. The Resultant is shown in window. It save the...New Releases.Net Max Framework: Version 1.0.0: Version 1.0.0 - EstableAndrew's XNA Helpers: V1.2: Features upgraded features based off of the V1.1 code for both X86 and XBOX Additions/Changes Reworked the Texture2D and Rectangle extender namesp...BaseCalendar: BaseControls 1.2: BaseControls 1.2 contains the BaseCalendar ASP.NET control. Changes: 1.2 Exposed EffectiveVisibleDate and FirstVisibleDay methods 1.1 Rendering ...Customer Book: Customer Book Code: Bronze Release PostgreSQL database dump for Customer Book. Open PgAdmin III and restore the database dump into your server. Notice User Name for t...Data Connection Suite: Data Connections Suite v1.0.0.0: This is the first release of this incomplete component, but good enought to use in a production environment (it's what we do).DigitArchive: Build 8: Now the software works on .NET 3.5 and above. So if you have Windows 7 it installs without any pre-requisites. Changes: -Works on .NET 3.5 -Now t...Doom 64 Ex (SVN Builds): Doom 64 Ex r-738: Finally a new build after so many months. There are way to many updates to even begin to write about here just download and frag away. There is a s...DotNetNuke® Media: 03.03.00a: This release is Beta!! There is no guaranteed upgrade path to the 03.03.00 release version! Please use this to help us and test what we have. Repor...Downline Commision Generator: Downline Commision Generator: Downline Commision GeneratorElmah2 : An extensable error logger for ASP.net: 1.0 Beta 1: This is a beta release be sure to report any errors etc. Be sure to check out the documentation tab on information on how to install and configure...EPiServer Template Foundation: First compiled release: First compiled release for experimenting only! :) An introductory post will be published shortly on the blog.Helium: Initial Release: This is the initial release of the Helium Engine. Please check out the documentation link for information on how to use the engine. To see a ful...IconizedButton Control Set: IconizedButton Control Set: Taking a line from Google's play book - marking everything as Beta. Seriously, I'd like to hear some feedback before moving the Development Status...JetPumpDesign: JetPumpDesign 1.0: 当前的软件可以设计5级以内的蒸汽喷射泵。Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework: Version 1.4.4 Installer: Tools TargetingVisual Studio 2010 Expression Blend 4 (part of Expression Studio 4) Analytics Services Included Vendor Behavior Silverlight 3...NHibernate Sidekick Library: 0.7.0: Added a few methods for use with the NHibernate 2nd level cache (EvictAllObjectsFromCache and EvictPersistentClass). I also added the boolean optio...NHibernate Sidekick Library: 0.7.5: Fix for http://nhprof.com/Learn/Alerts/DoNotUseImplicitTransactionsNito.KitchenSink: Version 9: Dependencies Nito.Linq 0.6 Beta (released 2010-06-14) Rx 1.0.2563.0 (released 2010-06-09) Supported Platforms .NET 4.0 Client Profile, with Rx. ...NQueue: Version 1.0.0.0: Version 1.0.0.0NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications: NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications 1.0 build 0: The very first stable releasePartial Rendering control for MVC 2: Partial Rendering control for MVC 2: Here there is the source code and a MVC 2 web site as testPowerShell Script Provider: PSProvider 0.1: Requires PowerShell 2.0 RTM The functions in the attached ps1 script are the bare minimum for a working container-style provider (no subfolders.) ...Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.4.3: Fixed issue where if an instance name contains backslash characters (\) the program would not load the performance counter properly. Also added sta...SharePointNuke: SharePointNuke 2.00.08: SharePointNuke 2.00.08 - Binary DotNetNuke 5.x module.Skype Voice Changer: 1.0 Updated Sample Code: This updated release is the accompanying code for the Skype Voice Changer article on Coding4Fun. Changes in this release: Added support for PreEmp...std::streambuf wrapper for COM IStream: Beta release (tested in a commercial project): This code has been tested in a custom Windows Search filter and property handler I wrote for a proprietary binary format. There may be some bugs, b...Sunlit World Scheme: Sunlit World Scheme - 20100615 - source and binary: This is the result of building the current source code in Debug mode. The source code is included. The binaries are in the SchemeCode folder along...Timo-Design / 40FINGERS DotNetNuke® Skinning Extensions: Style Helper Skin Object Beta: The 40FINGERS Style Helper Skin object allows you to add CSS and Javascript links and meta tags to the head of your page. It can also remove CSS l...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.1 RC: This is the final test version of Umbraco 4.1 before the final release. PLEASE BE AWARE THAT UMBRACO 4.1 RC IS A .NET 4.0 RELEASE AND WON'T WORK O...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30615.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010: UserNameForCertificate Template: Produces a WCF service application supporting username and password authentication, relying on message security to protect messages en route. Suppl...WCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010: UserNameOverHttps Template: Produces a WCF service application supporting username and password authentication over HTTPS/SSL, relying on transport security to protect message...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib 0.4.1 alpha (ReSharper 5.1.1709 only): xunitcontrib release 0.4.1 (ReSharper runner) This release targets the current nightly build of ReSharper 5.1's Early Access Programme (build 1709)...Most Popular ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRIA Services EssentialsNeatUploadBxf (Basic XAML Framework).NET Transactional File ManagerSOLID by exampleSSIS Expression Editor & TesterWEI ShareChirpy - VS Add In For Handling Js, Css, and DotLess FilesASP.NET MVC Time PlannerMost Active ProjectsdotSpatialRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeCassandraemonpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeLightweight Fluent Workflowpatterns & practices: Enterprise Library ContribNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services

  Read the article

• Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

  Read the article

• Authenticating clients in the new WCF Http stack

  - by cibrax

  About this time last year, I wrote a couple of posts about how to use the “Interceptors” from the REST starker kit for implementing several authentication mechanisms like “SAML”, “Basic Authentication” or “OAuth” in the WCF Web programming model. The things have changed a lot since then, and Glenn finally put on our hands a new version of the Web programming model that deserves some attention and I believe will help us a lot to build more Http oriented services in the .NET stack. What you can get today from wcf.codeplex.com is a preview with some cool features like Http Processors (which I already discussed here), a new and improved version of the HttpClient library, Dependency injection and better TDD support among others. However, the framework still does not support an standard way of doing client authentication on the services (This is something planned for the upcoming releases I believe). For that reason, moving the existing authentication interceptors to this new programming model was one of the things I did in the last few days. In order to make authentication simple and easy to extend,  I first came up with a model based on what I called “Authentication Interceptors”. An authentication interceptor maps to an existing Http authentication mechanism and implements the following interface, public interface IAuthenticationInterceptor{ string Scheme { get; } bool DoAuthentication(HttpRequestMessage request, HttpResponseMessage response, out IPrincipal principal);} An authentication interceptors basically needs to returns the http authentication schema that implements in the property “Scheme”, and implements the authentication mechanism in the method “DoAuthentication”. As you can see, this last method “DoAuthentication” only relies on the HttpRequestMessage and HttpResponseMessage classes, making the testing of this interceptor very simple (There is no need to do some black magic with the WCF context or messages). After this, I implemented a couple of interceptors for supporting basic authentication and brokered authentication with SAML (using WIF) in my services. The following code illustrates how the basic authentication interceptors looks like. public class BasicAuthenticationInterceptor : IAuthenticationInterceptor{ Func<UsernameAndPassword, bool> userValidation; string realm;  public BasicAuthenticationInterceptor(Func<UsernameAndPassword, bool> userValidation, string realm) { if (userValidation == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("userValidation");  if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(realm)) throw new ArgumentNullException("realm");  this.userValidation = userValidation; this.realm = realm; }  public string Scheme { get { return "Basic"; } }  public bool DoAuthentication(HttpRequestMessage request, HttpResponseMessage response, out IPrincipal principal) { string[] credentials = ExtractCredentials(request); if (credentials.Length == 0 || !AuthenticateUser(credentials[0], credentials[1])) { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized; response.Content = new StringContent("Access denied"); response.Headers.WwwAuthenticate.Add(new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Basic", "realm=" + this.realm));  principal = null;  return false; } else { principal = new GenericPrincipal(new GenericIdentity(credentials[0]), new string[] {});  return true; } }  private string[] ExtractCredentials(HttpRequestMessage request) { if (request.Headers.Authorization != null && request.Headers.Authorization.Scheme.StartsWith("Basic")) { string encodedUserPass = request.Headers.Authorization.Parameter.Trim();  Encoding encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"); string userPass = encoding.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(encodedUserPass)); int separator = userPass.IndexOf(':');  string[] credentials = new string[2]; credentials[0] = userPass.Substring(0, separator); credentials[1] = userPass.Substring(separator + 1);  return credentials; }  return new string[] { }; }  private bool AuthenticateUser(string username, string password) { var usernameAndPassword = new UsernameAndPassword { Username = username, Password = password };  if (this.userValidation(usernameAndPassword)) { return true; }  return false; }} This interceptor receives in the constructor a callback in the form of a Func delegate for authenticating the user and the “realm”, which is required as part of the implementation. The rest is a general implementation of the basic authentication mechanism using standard http request and response messages. I also implemented another interceptor for authenticating a SAML token with WIF. public class SamlAuthenticationInterceptor : IAuthenticationInterceptor{ SecurityTokenHandlerCollection handlers = null;  public SamlAuthenticationInterceptor(SecurityTokenHandlerCollection handlers) { if (handlers == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("handlers");  this.handlers = handlers; }  public string Scheme { get { return "saml"; } }  public bool DoAuthentication(HttpRequestMessage request, HttpResponseMessage response, out IPrincipal principal) { SecurityToken token = ExtractCredentials(request);  if (token != null) { ClaimsIdentityCollection claims = handlers.ValidateToken(token);  principal = new ClaimsPrincipal(claims);  return true; } else { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized; response.Content = new StringContent("Access denied");  principal = null;  return false; } }  private SecurityToken ExtractCredentials(HttpRequestMessage request) { if (request.Headers.Authorization != null && request.Headers.Authorization.Scheme == "saml") { XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(new StringReader(request.Headers.Authorization.Parameter));  var col = SecurityTokenHandlerCollection.CreateDefaultSecurityTokenHandlerCollection(); SecurityToken token = col.ReadToken(xmlReader);  return token; }  return null; }}This implementation receives a “SecurityTokenHandlerCollection” instance as part of the constructor. This class is part of WIF, and basically represents a collection of token managers to know how to handle specific xml authentication tokens (SAML is one of them). I also created a set of extension methods for injecting these interceptors as part of a service route when the service is initialized. var basicAuthentication = new BasicAuthenticationInterceptor((u) => true, "ContactManager");var samlAuthentication = new SamlAuthenticationInterceptor(serviceConfiguration.SecurityTokenHandlers); // use MEF for providing instancesvar catalog = new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Global).Assembly);var container = new CompositionContainer(catalog);var configuration = new ContactManagerConfiguration(container); RouteTable.Routes.AddServiceRoute<ContactResource>("contact", configuration, basicAuthentication, samlAuthentication);RouteTable.Routes.AddServiceRoute<ContactsResource>("contacts", configuration, basicAuthentication, samlAuthentication); In the code above, I am injecting the basic authentication and saml authentication interceptors in the “contact” and “contacts” resource implementations that come as samples in the code preview. I will use another post to discuss more in detail how the brokered authentication with SAML model works with this new WCF Http bits. The code is available to download in this location.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 25, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 25, 2011Popular ReleasesMosaic Project: Mosaic Alpha build 252: First public release There are 8 widgets: - Desktop - Gmail - Weather - Control panel - Me - Video - Clock - PicturesUsage Agent: Usage Agent 9.0.8: Latest release. Changes include: - Fixes for Optus - Usage Delta statistic for BigPond - Eliminated the need for UAC prompt at every startupjQuery List DragSort: jQuery List DragSort 0.4.3: Fix item not dropping correctly on Chrome and jQuery 1.6KinectNUI: Jun 25 Alpha Release: Initial public version. No installer needed, just run the EXE.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.3 [v1.0.5 Compatible]: I have added support for all the new items in Terraria v1.0.5. I have also added the ability to put your character in hardcore mode or take them out via a simple checkbox on the stats tab. If you come across any bugs, please let me know immediately.Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.5: Update June 24th Made compatible with the new tiles found in Terraria 1.0.5Kinect Earth Move: KinectEarthMove sample code: Sample code releasedThis is a sample code for Kinect for Windows SDK beta, which was demonstrated on Channel 9 Kinect for Windows SKD beta launch event on June 17 2011. Using color image and skeleton data from Kinect and user in front of Kinect can manipulate the earth between his/her hands.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9b: Changes: - fix critical issue 262334 (AccessViolationException while using events in a COMAddin) - remove x64 Assemblies (not necessary) Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...MiniTwitter: 1.70: MiniTwitter 1.70 ???? ?? ????? xAuth ?? OAuth ??????? 1.70 ??????????????????????????。 ???????????????? Twitter ? Web ??????????、PIN ????????????????????。??????????????????、???????????????????????????。Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.7b: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.7b. Bug fixes: - BROKEN PLUGIN by upgrading SkyDriveServiceClient version 2.0.1b. Please do not forget to express your opinion of the plugin by rating it! Donate (EUR)SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 2.0.1b (RELOADED): SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly has been RELOADED in version 2.0.1b as a REAL API. It supports the followings: - Creating root and sub folders - Uploading and downloading files - Renaming and deleting folders and files Bug fixes: - BROKEN API (issue 6834) Please do not forget to express your opinion of the assembly by rating it! Donate (EUR)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query v1.0.0.59794: This release includes the following enhancements: Added a Most Recently Used file list Added Row counts to the query (per tab) and table view windows Added the Command Timeout option, only valid for MSSQL for now - see options If you have no idea what this thing is make sure you check out http://pksoftware.net/MiniSqlQuery/Help/MiniSqlQueryQuickStart.docx for an introduction. PK :-]HydroDesktop - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Desktop Application: 1.2.591 Beta Release: 1.2.591 Beta Releasepatterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 12 - June 22, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Minor code changes. New "Introduction" chapter. New "Modularity" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Updated "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To ins...SQL Server HowTo: Version 1.0: Initial ReleaseDropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.3: Added "Get links..." dialog, that provides selective public files links copying Get links link added to tray menu as the default option Fixed URL encoding .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.00.00 Beta: Beta 1 (Build 2300) includes many important enhancements to the user experience. The control panel has been updated for easier access to the most important features and additional forms have been adapted to the new pattern. This release also includes many bug fixes that make it more stable than previous CTP releases. Beta ForumsBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC: BlogEngine.NET Hosting - Click Here! 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! This is a Release Candidate version for BlogEngine.NET 2.5. The most current, stable version of BlogEngine.NET is version 2.0. Find out more about the BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC here. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. To get started, be sure to check out our installation documentation. If you are upgrading from a previous version, please take a look at ...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: All-In-One Code Framework 2011-06-19: Alternatively, you can install Sample Browser or Sample Browser VS extension, and download the code samples from Sample Browser. Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for Windows Azure Sample Description Owner CSAzureStartupTask The sample demonstrates using the startup tasks to install the prerequisites or to modify configuration settings for your environment in Windows Azure Rafe Wu ...IronPython: 2.7.1 Beta 1: This is the first beta release of IronPython 2.7. Like IronPython 54498, this release requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4. This release will replace any existing IronPython installation. The highlights of this release are: Updated the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2. Add the ast, csv, and unicodedata modules. Fixed several bugs. IronPython Tools for Visual Studio are disabled by default. See http://pytools.codeplex.com for the next generation of Python Visual Studio support. See...New Projects.Net Image Processor: An image processing wrapper around GDI+, allowing you to apply one or more filters against an image source. Out-of-the-box support: * Conversion from one image type to another * Image resizing and various strategies for resolving aspect ratio * Edge detection * GIF support * Chaining filters together to perform complex operations on a single image Filters can be stacked and queued so that they run one after the other in a process queue. The processor can accept filenames, streams o...AsyncGetListSample: Reactive Extensions?????、Twitter??????????????????????????????。Awful for Windows Phone 7: Awful for Windows Phone 7 is a work-in-progress forum reader software for the Something Awful Forums.binzlog2.com: BlogEngine sourceCaffeine Model: A view model framework that specifically targets problems such as change recognition, validation and graph traversal. Provides robust support in these areas and base classes from which to build off of.CxBuild: cxbuildDotNetNuke Scheduler DashboardControl: The DNNSchedulerDashboard control adds a new control to the DotNetNuke Dashboard module that monitors the execution of the tasks in the DNN Scheduler. This control will keep host administrators informed on the tasks that are not executing on time.fkanban: A free Agile tool insist of Product backlog,sprint,Kanban etcKillstone Spycam: A "WebCam Timershot" style application that can take photos from a DirectShow device at a specified interval and save to disk and/or upload via FTP.Live Services for Moodle 1.9: This is a modification to the original Microsoft Live Services for Moodle allowing users to chat through Live Messenger using the web client.MoreEPG: Import of Extern EPG in Windows Media Center (Windows 7)NAntExt: The NAntExt is an extensions library for NAnt. This library includes Tasks and Functions which are much needed in using NAnt, but are not included in NAnt or NAntContrib. The ideal would be to eventually cycle them back into one of these projects. NetSquare - FourSquare C#.NET Open Source Class Library: NetSquare makes it easy to access Foursquare via the new v2 OAuth interface. This will be published as a VS 2010 C# project with associated examples.Power Presenter 2011: Do you want to make a great photo slideshow? Then get Power Presenter the best for showing phothos. Music with a click from the menu of the window. Better for you!!! If you want to join us it is a single rule NO-SEELING & NO-MONEY. It is developed in VB.NET. PowerPackPS: PowerPackPS is a DSV for creating PowerGUI PowerPacks using Powershell instead of the GUI or XML.Resuming Action Results for ASP.NET MVC: Resuming Action Results for MVC provides a similar implementation as the standard FileResult ActionResult objects but with the intelligence to detect range requests and respond appropriately with no need to write a single extra line of code.SoundSwitch: SoundSwitch makes it easier to switch playback devices (sound cards). Normally, to switch a Playback device you need to right click the sound icon in the bottom right corner of your screen (system tray), choose "Playback devices" and then change the default playback device. Every time you want to switch. With SoundSwitch you just configure once between which Playback devices you want to toggle and then you can press Ctrl+Alt+F11 to toggle automatically!StopWatch Plus: This is a simple stopwatch with which you can set a countdown, save and control the various steps imposed by the pause button. The projects will is still under development and not yet possess all the qualities mentioned above, currently is a simple countdown. _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Questo è un semplice cronometro col quale si potrà impostare un conto alla rovescia, salvare e tenere sotto controllo i vari step ...TFS Reports: The TFS Reports project is about sharing knowledge around the reporting capabilities in TFS and contains both guidance as well as ready to use reports. TRK ATR: Website for TV/Radio channel UpdateTool: A tool used to update client This project is for personal use. Please do not download in now.Windows Service Helper: Helps by creating a Play/Stop/Pause UI when running with a debugger attached, but also allows the windows service to be installed and run by the Windows Services environment as well. All this with one line of code!XNB filetype plugin for Paint.NET: This plugin allows viewing and editing of XNA compiled textures from inside Paint.NET.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – 3 Online SQL Courses at Pluralsight and Free Learning Resources

  - by pinaldave

  Usain Bolt is an inspiration for all. He broke his own record multiple times because he wanted to do better! Read more about him on wikipedia. He is great and indeed fastest man on the planet. Usain Bolt – World’s Fastest Man “Can you teach me SQL Server Performance Tuning?” This is one of the most popular questions which I receive all the time. The answer is YES. I would love to do performance tuning training for anyone, anywhere.  It is my favorite thing to do, and it is my favorite thing to train others in.  If possible, I would love to do training 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  To me, it doesn’t feel like a job. Of course, as much as I would love to do performance tuning 24/7/365, obviously I am just one human being and can only be in one place t one time.  It is also very difficult to train more than one person at a time, and it is difficult to train two or more people at a time, especially when the two people are at different levels.  I am also limited by geography.  I live in India, and adjust to my own time zone.  Trying to teach a live course from India to someone whose time zone is 12 or more hours off of mine is very difficult.  If I am trying to teach at 2 am, I am sure I am not at my best! There was only one solution to scale – Online Trainings. I have built 3 different courses on SQL Server Performance Tuning with Pluralsight. Now I have no problem – I am 100% scalable and available 24/7 and 365. You can make me say the same things again and again till you find it right. I am in your mobile, PC as well as on XBOX. This is why I am such a big fan of online courses.  I have recorded many performance tuning classes and you can easily access them online, at your own time.  And don’t think that just because these aren’t live classes you won’t be able to get any feedback from me.  I encourage all my viewers to go ahead and ask me questions by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever way you can get a hold of me. Here are details of three of my courses with Pluralsight. I suggest you go over the description of the course. As an author of the course, I have few FREE codes for watching the free courses. Please leave a comment with your valid email address, I will send a few of them to random winners. SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning  SQL Server performance tuning is an art to master – for developers and DBAs alike. This course takes a systematic approach to planning, analyzing, debugging and troubleshooting common query-related performance problems. This includes an introduction to understanding execution plans inside SQL Server. In this almost four hour course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 10:22 Execution Plan Basics 45:59 Essential Indexing Techniques 20:19 Query Design for Performance 50:16 Performance Tuning Tools 01:15:14 Tips and Tricks 25:53 Checklist: Performance Tuning 07:13 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics This course teaches you how to master the art of performance tuning SQL Server by better understanding indexes. In this almost two hour course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 02:03 Fundamentals of Indexing 22:21 Practical Indexing Implementation Techniques 37:25 Index Maintenance 16:33 Introduction to ColumnstoreIndex 08:06 Indexing Practical Performance Tips and Tricks 24:56 Checklist : Index and Performance 07:29 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL Server Questions and Answers This course is designed to help you better understand how to use SQL Server effectively. The course presents many of the common misconceptions about SQL Server, and then carefully debunks those misconceptions with clear explanations and short but compelling demos, showing you how SQL Server really works. In this almost 2 hours and 15 minutes course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 00:54 Retrieving IDENTITY value using @@IDENTITY 08:38 Concepts Related to Identity Values 04:15 Difference between WHERE and HAVING 05:52 Order in WHERE clause 07:29 Concepts Around Temporary Tables and Table Variables 09:03 Are stored procedures pre-compiled? 05:09 UNIQUE INDEX and NULLs problem 06:40 DELETE VS TRUNCATE 06:07 Locks and Duration of Transactions 15:11 Nested Transaction and Rollback 09:16 Understanding Date/Time Datatypes 07:40 Differences between VARCHAR and NVARCHAR datatypes 06:38 Precedence of DENY and GRANT security permissions 05:29 Identify Blocking Process 06:37 NULLS usage with Dynamic SQL 08:03 Appendix Tips and Tricks with Tools 20:44 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL in Sixty Seconds You will have to login and to get subscribed to the courses to view them. Here are my free video learning resources SQL in Sixty Seconds. These are 60 second video which I have built on various subjects related to SQL Server. Do let me know what you think about them? Here are three of my latest videos: Identify Most Resource Intensive Queries – SQL in Sixty Seconds #028 Copy Column Headers from Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #027 Effect of Collation on Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #026 You can watch and learn at your own pace.  Then you can easily ask me any questions you have.  E-mail is easiest, but for really tough questions I’m willing to talk on Skype, Gtalk, or even Facebook chat.  Please do watch and then talk with me, I am always available on the internet! Here is the video of the world’s fastest man.Usain St. Leo Bolt inspires us that we all do better than best. We can go the next level of our own record. We all can improve if we have a will and dedication.  Watch the video from 5:00 mark. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology, Video

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 546 547 548 549 550 551 552 553 554 555 556 557  | Next Page >